Re: Heyas all!

Trace Erin Kern wrote:
> As for what I mean by 'creating'...One author gave me the advice to use
> the species culture as a language base. A militaristic species will
> likely have alot of harsh gutteral <sp?> phonetics, where a more relaxed
> or perhaps reptillian species will have alot of soft and sibilant sounds.
Well, those are more like prejudices than good advice.  A pacifistic
society could have a language with tons of gutturals, and a warlike
people could have lots of /l/'s and /s/'s.  Actually, that might create
some interesting phrases, say, the gentle-sounding [lasaja masina] means
"prepare to die, Earth-scum", while the harsh-sounding [qaQt'a?aGH Gqa?]
means "we wish to help your world".

> Sort of. I've had the 'alien' words floating around in my head for a
> while, then decided to give temporary meaning to them. This translation
> isn't part of a full language unfortunately.
Cool.  It could be the beginning of a conlang.  I assume you have a
pronunciation for that?  If so, start with those sounds, and expand on
it, to give you your phonology, and then break down the words in some
way into morphemes, and assign meanings, so for

Hah'Rooqh Tah'Khrine, Eayl Noh'Tahl
May you go in peace, all your journey

you could have:

Hah'-Rooqh Tah'-Khri-ne, Eay-l Noh'-Tahl
In-Peace May-go-you, you-possessive all-journey

Thus, by this break-down, it appears that this language inflects verbs
for person, and either has some sort of case system, or simply attaches
prepositions to words (decide, for instance, how adjectives would be
dealt with, in-red house or red in-house or in-red in-house, to figure
if it's a case or a preposition).  It also has a prefix for blessings.
Most likely, it would have prefixes for things like imperatives (perhaps
VanKhrine = go!).  Is the apostrophe a sound, like glottal stop, or does
it separate prefixes from their stem, as Steg Belsky has done with
Rokbeigalki (sp?)?  Or perhaps h' is a single unit.

These are just a few ideas, you could do whatever you want with it, of
course.  Actually, I rather like Noh'Tahl for journey.  Maybe I'll adapt
it as _pinuta'l_ (pi- = gender 7) for Watya'i'sa.

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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