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From:J. Barefoot <lesfraises@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 23, 1998, 16:49
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? ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com