Re: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful)

Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this . . .

> Looking over Sturnan, I realize that it began mainly as a relex of
> English, with some bits added from Spanish. But look at it now! It
> resembles...well, nothing, as far as grammar goes, and PIE, as the
> lexicon goes.
At the risk of asking the obvious, it's an IE-based lang, then?

> particle and three imperative particles*. There are five sets of
> conjugations (past, present, today-future, future, aorist) rather than
> six (the normal three with perfect aspect) or just three.
And what mean these?  I find this distribution of tenses a bit surprising,
especially since you appear to have more distinctions in the future than
the past.  The future tense is marginal, semantically and typologically,
and languages almost never make distinctions in the future that they don't
make in the past.  So if there's a near-future tense, I'd also expect a
near-past, at least.  And "aorist" is a mighty flexible term--what does it
mean here?

> *Ta is the basic imperative; sona is the polite imperative; elnas is the
> suggestive imperative.
This is neat.

>
> Example of some of the better bits of Sturnan:
> Kwe ta im aroter a pela?
> INT IMP I plough-1s.pst the field?
>
> That's right. Interrogative with the imperative and the past tense. It
> means "Do you wish that I had ploughed the field?"
Hmmm.  I don't think that this interpretation makes sense--I would have
guessed at "Did I have to plough the field?"  Where do you get "you wish"
from?  Why does the imperative require that gloss?  At any rate, this
doesn't strike me as particularly flashy--imperative and interrogative go
together quite nicely.

> Vengei /veN gE/ to walk, to go
Eh?  It's *very* odd for a conlang to write {ei} for [E] and {e} for [e].
Is that what you meant?  Or did you confuse the phonetic symbols?

> Dakurei /da ku rE/ to cry
> Peresko /pe res ko/ oak tree
> Kamhel /kam hel/ tired
> Kerosei /ke ro sE/ to worship
I do like the words.  Rather typically Quenya/Western European-esque
pretty, but that's the pot calling the kettle black ;-).


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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