Re: Once upon a time

On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, James Campbell wrote:

>A correspondent recently asked me how one would write 'Once upon a time...'
>in Jameld; as yet, I haven't settled on a suitable idiom.
>
>Are there equivalent expressions in your conlangs
Heroic sagas of the (now long dead) Erroni empire always
began:

Samlan! Isalûgustaro-dom-cronamid lâgman!
And-now Tells-the-tale            story-teller

Samlan is a conjunction. While Erroni syntax is not well understood,
it is known that functional phrasal groups are all connected by what
are termed "relative markers". They can act as conjunctions, adverbs,
prepositions, etc. Some of these relative markers can occur
independantly; even so, it's clear that samlan is connected to the
phrasal group that follows.

Isalûgustaro-dom-cronamid is a phrasal group, formed by the relative
marker -dom-, which indicates possession. In this sort of case, the
possessor seems to be the subject of the verb, which is lâgman. [The
subject of the verb is seen as owning the object of the verb in a
grammatical sort of way.] Isalûgustaro is the verb: 3s historical
aorist. Erronian has 4 persons (4th person is impersonal); an unknown
number of tenses and aspects. Known tenses are past and historical
(kind of means "no tense specified"), of which isa- is the preverbial
marker. Known aspects are perfect, progressive and aorist (state of
completion not specified), of which -star- is the post stem affix.
-o is the 3s ending. The verbal root is lûg- and means "sing,
speak or tell. Through a system of ablaut, nominal roots can be
formed. Based on l_g-, we find lâgami (speech, story, song) and lôgami
(recollection, rememberance).

Cronamid means "epic legend". It is the object of the verb, and is
thus found in the accusative case. -i- is the stem formation; -d is
the accusative marker.

Lâgman simply takes the root lâg- and adds the agent noun affix -man-.
There are two known stem classes (-i-, and -e-) and two declensions:
active and passive with different case systems. Verbs are considered
active only if there is an explicit subject. Otherwise, it is
considered passive. Thus, simply writing "Isalûgustaro-dom-cronamid"
makes for a passive sentence: the story is told. The nominative has no
case marker, so lâgman is the root and the full form.

Padraic.

>Jamets the curious