Intro

Sam Byrant wrote:
>Many greetings from a fellow high-school conlanger. I'm glad you've
>found us, it's a wonderful place (as if you need me to tell you >that).
Welcome. I'm sure I'm not the only one wanting to see a >sample of your
latest efforts, so please share.

Well, since you asked so nicely.

The latest thing that I've worked on for more than a week is tentatively
called T'enasetye, where the apostrophe means aspirated, and Cy means
palatalization. (I suppose I should learn ASCII IPA.)It's really just
the word for "words".

It makes no distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants, though
it has contrastive aspirated and palatalized series. Basic 5 vowel
system. No consonant clusters. Syllable structure: (C1)V(C2) where C2
cannot be palatalized. Stress on 2nd syllable, secondary on penult in
words longer than 4 syllables.

Two derivational classes: closed roots that take suffixes to mark part
of speech and open roots that take infixes. Other semantic distinctions
shown by prefixes.
Example of derivation:

root: san - big
sani m1 - bigness
sanas m2 - a big thing
sana f1 - a great person
sanye - big, large, great(ly) (adj/adv)
syesanon 1 - 1. to build up, to add to; 2. to praise
etyasanon 1 - to grow
usanye - huge (adj/adv)
sisani m1 - growth
asisan m2 - plant

Nouns
2 genders, 2 declensions. Fem ends in "a", masc in another V or C.
Declension 1 = words that end in a V, declension 2 = words that end in a
C. A few masc nouns that end in "as" form the stem by dropping the "s",
and are thus declen. 1. The animate equivalent of these nouns cannot end
in "a" as they would have the same stem.

Cases are inflectional, with separate ending for sing and plural. All
endings for a certain case have the same characterisic C. Nominative,
accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, partitive (d.o. of negative
verb) adessive and comparative.

Adjectives and adverbs are the same words. When one modifies a noun, it
agrees in gender and number, but not case, as they always immediately
follow the head.

ex. kyena - peaceful
      fem       masc
sing kyena      kyeno
plu  kyenatye   kyenotye

Verbs
2 conjugations. Stem formed by dropping the "n" from the infinitive. 1st
conj. - stems end in "o", formed from closed roots, 2nd, stems end in
another V, formed from open roots. Tenses distinguished by suffixes :
historical/distant past, plain past, present, progressive, plain future,
distant/speculative/prophetic future, also used as an imperative.
Particles after verb show things like, voice, aspect, mood.
Negation : kanon (to not do something) + infinitive.
ex. I will not speak. (plain future, fem.) Kanomi t'enon a.

Personal pronouns - complete set for fem and masc, separate formal 2nd
and 3rd persons. Formal 2nd person used for elders, acquaintances and
authority, informal 3rd implies that the speaker knows the subject
personally. Plurals decline irregularly.

Word order
Basic sentence VOS, noun phrase - noun, adj, relative clause.
Relative clause = SVO, beginning of clause marked with particle "na", no
deletion.
Ex. I (m) spoke to a beautiful woman who dreamt beautiful things.
    Speak.plainpast woman.dat beautiful.femsing -this clause
relative- she.dat dream.plainpast beautifulthing.accplu I.

T'enonyete tyenake pale na pyake syomonyete palanye o.

Questions - particle at end of sentence.

Forthcoming literature - Inyet'enasetye kyetase syenyei "The Sayings of
Kyeta the Wise" (yes, that's fem), a collection of proverbs.

Myself being a newcomer here, perhaps y'all would care to reciprocate
with a sample of your own?


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