Re: Interlinears for toma heylm

Amanda Babcock wrote:
>
> Ok, stuck at work with my customers all out of the office.  What to do?
>
> How about I provide interlinears for my three t-shirt candidates?  Let me
> do toma heylm first, since it's the one I submitted for the shirt.
>
>         toma     ilom       delye           teryek      arya
>         language 2p.sg.poss aux:conditional belong.sg.m here
>
> Stress is on the first syllable.
>
> Noun case is shown via prefixes and suffixes.  The only noun in the above
> sentence is in the nominative, so it is bare.  Nouns have gender.  There
> is a tendency for nouns ending in vowels to be male and those ending in
> consonants to be female, but apart from that, it is not marked.
>
> There are 6 cases.  Inexplicably, I can't find a genitive case.  I'll have
> to consult the source documents when I get home, but I think this was one
> of those "interesting" design decisions ;).  Affixes each have two forms,
> one to attach to vowels and the other to attach to consonants.
>
        How do you form possessives noun phrases then? Do you have
prepositions, postpositions or things like that?

> The case affixes:
>                                 language        tongue
>
>         Nom.    none            toma            elek
>         Acc.    -u/-yu          tomayu          eleku
>         Dat.    a-/ay-          atoma           ayelek
>         Instr.  o-/oy-          otoma           oyelek
>         Caus.   hi-/iy-         hitoma          iyelek
>         Loc.    yu-/uy-         yutoma          uyelek
>
> In the case of prefixes, stress remains on the first syllable of the root.
> If the chart looks messy, try a fixed font with tab stops set to 8 spaces.
>
        I like the fact that all oblique cases are shown by a prefix, whereas
the accusative is shown by a suffix. It sounds good to me at least.

> Pronouns are declined; "ilom" is the possessive form of the second person
> singular.  Between them being declined into 6 cases, some of them being
> gendered, and some of them having duplar forms as well as plural, there
> are 46, and they are all irregular!  Plus, they have 6 cases, but they're
> a completely different set than the nouns (oh dear).  Pronomial cases are
> nominative, accusative, possessive, dative, ablative, and reflexive - I'm
> not even sure that's a case.
>
        If by reflexive you mean: at the same time nominative and accusative
(or nominative and another case at the same time), then I think it's a
perfect case! I should have thought of it earlier to my Azak :) .

        I find it strange that the pronouns have a different set of cases than
the nouns. But maybe it is related to their irregularity, if they come
from different kinds of particles that began to be seen as belonging to
the same PoS because of their use (for instance, possessive particles
began to be considered as a special case of the nominative personals,
that would explain the presence of a possessive for the pronouns, and
not for the nouns, as well as their high irregularity).

>
> That leaves "arya", "here".  It's an adverb.  Adverbs in toma heylm don't
> decline or take particles.  Do adverbs in natlangs ever inflect?
>
        I don't know of a natlang that inflect adverbs, but that doesn't mean
that it's impossible. One of my first conlangs inflected adverbs
depending on the part of speech they completed. I found it nice because
I could separate the adverb from the word it completed, or put it before
or after as I wished, and it was still understandable. I stopped to use
this feature because I generally have languages without adverbs as such,
except in my last conlang Chasma"o"cho, where an adverb has a
non-conjunctive and a conjunctive form, depending on whether it is the
only one to modify the same word or not.

> About the only thing I haven't covered is the number system.  It seems to
> be a mixed base-5 and base-10 system.  The base-5 stuff gives fun numbers
> like "lesyet: 390,625".
>
        :)

> As you might have guessed, I made this language a long time ago.  Trying
> to explain it has been fun!  It did take longer than I expected, though.
> Interlinears for the other two languages will have to wait for another
> day.
>
        I can't wait!

> Amanda
--
        Christophe Grandsire

        Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
        Prof. Holstlaan 4
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        The Netherlands

        Phone:  +31-40-27-45006
        E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com