Re: CHAT: Bob's Introduction

Robert Hailman wrote:
> That's an interesting quote
Yeah, I like it.  It was, incidentally, the inspiration for Asimov's
story "Nightfall".

> and a strange language.
Thanks, I try to make it a bit "exotic", a few unusual features thrown
in like case-agreement (wherein a word can have more than one case
suffix, one suffix to agree with the head noun, and one to show its own
use).  :-)  Wafsafíif means "of births", waf- = gender 6 plural, safí =
birth, -i = plural, -f = genitive, watyánivaf = "in the year" wa- =
gender 6 singular, tyáni = year, -v = locative, -af = genitive (to agree
with the head noun wafsafíif), plal is a particle indicating apposition,
derived ultimately from _pli sál_ = "which is"; 273 is the current year,
thus it means "16[th day] of [the month of] Births in the year 273"

> I see there's a culture behind it, that's always fun. What did you do
> first, the language or the culture.
The language, but there was from the beginning a vague notion of the
culture.  I've also vaguely sketched out ancestral forms and related
dialects, as well as experimenting around with descendants of it.  The
language as described by me is Classical Watakassí, spoken around the
year 1 in their calendar; specifically, it's the dialect used by the
Prophetess, and the calendar counts from the Revelation.

--
"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men
believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of
the city of God!" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
16 Wafsafíif watyánivaf plal 273
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