Re: Goodnight Moon in Iltârer

Shreyas wrote:

>Mmm... Ilt^arer is lovely.
Thanks!

>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(:
Then I'm not too far off the mark. The Iltâr, while not the sort of faerie
folk you've brought to mind, hold a somewhat similar place in the stories
of the Thekashi people. They are very long-lived, creative, artistic
people, uncomfortable in heavily populated places...and they do like to
wear their hair long!


> >> Silâ âc theritsamasther
>This is a beautiful sequence of sounds.
>
> >> Pêsamtil pircaphal â nîccacasa pem pammâlith
>This is too.
Thanks again. "Pem pammâlith" is "over the moon"--and seems very right,
somehow.


> >> "theritsamasther" for telephone (I may
> >> have to start using that one at the office!)
>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.
The Iltâr are not averse to technology, but use it sparingly, and with an
eye to esthetics. I doubt that many homes have a theritsamasther.



> >> 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.
Actually, it's not as bad as it looks. "Necanihtil" is "berry", and
-silithin is the collective referential ending, which signals a
metaphorical use. So to native speakers, it wouldn't come across as just an
interminable stream of syllables, but rather like a phrase in English:
"like a berry". So in reality, I think even young children would manage
this fine; it's just seems funny to English speakers to have the simple
concepts of a children's book rendered in such a style.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Tadfor Little            tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA)
Telperion Productions        www.telp.com
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