Re: Website with BabelText and grammars!

>Hi! I've just created a website containing grammars for dwarfish and lower
>elfish, as well as a translation of Genesis 11:1-11:9 into dwarfish. There
>will develop in the future. Please take a look at the languages and give
>me some coments (in this list - there is no guest book jet). Here's the
>address: http://www.ylp.net.tc
The internal/external person distinction is nifty and the manner of
inflection looks reasonably exotic for elves.

>State verbs also have a plural, which is formed by
>attaching k (or ik if the preceding word ends in a consonant) to the verb.
Should that maybe be -ik for internal or -ok for external?

>Nouns aren't conjugated. Their case is shown by their position.
>The word order is: Akk. Dat. Gen. Nom. Verb.
Should probably be "Acc.".  Also, the formatting is confusing here
(as in many other places throughout the site).

If a sentence has three nouns preceding the verb, how do you tell
whether the first two are accusative and dative, acc. and genitive, or what?
E.g.

dog wife brother give

could be "The wife's brother gives a dog" or
"The brother gives a dog to his wife".

>The genitive is formed on both the possessed item as well as on the possessor.
This seems contradictory to "Nouns aren't conjugated."

The grammar explanations would be clearer if you gave example
words and sentences with glosses.  Look at the way people have
been glossing their translations of "The man who removes a mountain..."
and "You can't add more years to your life...", or look at the Leipzig Rules
page: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html.

The formatting makes the page difficult to read.  You should use
<P> tags instead of <BR> tags for paragraph breaks, and several places
you have stuff crammed together that could be better formatted in
either a definition list or a table.

The frameset makes it hard to know where in the site you are and
link to a specified page within the site.  My comments above refer to the
page "Lower Elfish " but I don't know the exact URL.
....OK, I figured it out:
http://humbold.freeprohost.com/lelang.html

Your email mentioned Babel texts but I couldn't find them.

On Trollish: http://humbold.freeprohost.com/tlang.html

>The infix is inserted in three ways:
>If the word has an even number of sylablles, it is inserted after half the sylablles.
....

OK, this is exotic and nonhuman.  But can Trolls count fast enough to speak
their language correctly?   :)

The formatting is not as bad as on the Elfish page, but wants some work - bullet lists
with <ul> and <li> would help for the genders and the cases-which-you-call-genders
(Active, Possesive, Passive, Utilitive).

It would be clearer to call the latter "cases" and use the standard terms.

Active = either nominative or ergative, you haven't given me enough to tell;
Possessive prob. = genitive
passive = accusative or absolutive
utilitive = instrumental

Are your genders (animate, etc.) logical or conventional?


- Jim Henry
http://www.mindspring.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm