Re: The last enemy

On 8/2/07, Douglas Koller <laokou@...> wrote:
> From: Mia Soderquist <happycritter@...>
> > Relative clauses have an opening (kwe)
> > and a close at the end (lia).
>
> So glad I'm not alone in this. Géarthnuns relative clauses start with a
> relative pronoun (duh!) too numerous to go into here and (and this is what
> struck my eye) a marker at the end of the clause, "sho". Géarthnuns is SOV
> and before I knew Japanese, I thought "sho" was just helping to direct
> traffic with the build-up of verbs at the end of a sentence (seemed to help
> restore some the rhythm I enjoyed from German):
> (snip snip)
> Anyway, I like that structure you've described (though I doubt Nevashi "lia" has the
> same scope as "sho"), where an imBEDded relative clause has a warm, toasty
> opening-closing binky surrounding it.
>
 I am glad you like it, and I am also glad to see that I'm not the
only doing something along these lines. This kwe-lia construction is
also used for making parenthetical remarks in the middle of a
sentence. (I do that a lot in daily speech in English, so I thought
I'd work it into a conlang in a formal way.)

> On to other things: Is there an ea-luna webpage? From what I knew of ea-luna,
> it always seemed to me a cosmic counterbalance/counterfoil to Géarthnuns.
>
There is no ea-luna webpage right now, but there will be eventually. I
had started one, but then I took it down for some reworking. It will
be back, new and improved.

ea-luna has completely resisted any attempt I've made to alter the
grammar, but the existing lexicon was in bad need of an overhaul. For
instance, it somehow ended up having 2 utterly unrelated words for
"die" and "death", which makes no sense in a language where nouns and
verbs are interchangeable.I also found a few significant holes in my
available vocabulary that I started patching. (No word for "lick"?!
What's up with that?... I ended up deciding that "tongue"/"lick" are a
noun/verb pair [same word] for that particular example.) I didn't
really notice these things so much when the only dictionary I had was
handwritten, ea-luna-to-English, in ea-luna syllabary order.  Those
are the problems I was last working on in ea-luna, before the
beginning of The Great Packing.

All my ea-luna related files are in my desktop PC, which is in storage
at the moment, so my work on it has ground to a halt for now. We're
trying to sell our house and then move, so right now, I am using a
slow, old laptop for all my Internet and conlanging needs. I can't
wait until we get moved so I can have my life, my PC, my books, and
all my other junk back!

Mia.