Mmm... Ilt^arer is lovely.
I can see it being spoken by woodnymphs and little nereids and lovely river-
spirits with endless hair. Unhurried, immortal beings. The wonderful
polysyllabic inflections are, as Matt said, very pretty(:
>Very pretty. ;-)
>BTW, I get to translate from Iltarer. I like this.
The relay lineup,you're meaning?
Yes, this year it's a great group of participants. I'm really looking
forward to seeing all the pretty conlang texts all over the place.
>> Silâ âc theritsamasther
This is a beautiful sequence of sounds.
>> Pêsamtil pircaphal â nîccacasa pem pammâlith
This is too.
>> This one came out a bit amusing; I'd designed Iltârer as a literary
>> language, thinking of philosophical and poetic eloquence. It seems almost
>> comically overstyled and long-winded for the simple sentences of a
>> children's book. I don't dare to count how many syllables the Iltârer
>> version has compared with the English! That's partly a consequence of the
>> limited phonemic system, which makes for more polysyllabic root words,
but
>> more a result of the lengthy inflectional ending ("-silithin") for the
>> collective referential of -l class nouns, and some other lengthy
inflections.
>>
>> My first reaction was a bit of alarm; no sane people would tolerate so
much
>> jaw-exercise to make such simple utterances. But on reflection, I think
it
>> suits the Iltâr, who are a patient, soft-spoken people. It's like music
>> with a bunch of short notes in each measure, harder to play straight off
>> the page, but nice sounding once it's learned. Maybe vaguely Entish,
>> although that was the farthest thing from my mind in drafting the
language
>> sketch.
>>
>> A few of the coinages for this translation really delight me:
>> "mimitîtterel" for a baby mouse, "theritsamasther" for telephone (I may
>> have to start using that one at the office!) and "timâchasa" for
Telephone, you say? Ilt^arer makes that nightmare device sound like
something one ould actually *want* in a house, rather than simply something
we need.
>> Still wondering, though, what a two-year-old would do with a language in
>> which "red" is "necanihtisilithin".
Umm... drop bits. Cause dramatic sound shifts. Neca~ihtslithi~. Again.
Again.
---
Shreyas