Re: Conlang T Shirt - Quenya

Brook Conner <nellardo@...> wrote:

> I guess I was thinking that the usage there was as a declarative,
> i.e., in the nominative case, as in English, "Here! I am going to live
> here." If "sinome" is *not* being used this way by King Elessar, then
> (as suggested) it is the direct object. Either "sinome" is *never
> declined*, or "mar-" does not use accusative for direct object (a
> lesser irregularity) or there's an error in the text (as "sinome"
> should have a long vowel at the end: "sinomee").
I think we're not understanding each other here. _Sinome_ means
'here' and _maruvan_ is mar- 'to dwell' + -uva (future tense) +
-n (1st person singular suffix). So it's plainly 'Here I will dwell'.
_Sinome_ is not the direct object, since _maruvan_ is apparently
intransitive; it's an adverb, and within the sentence it's a
complement (or oblique phrase, or whatever). This unless _maruvan_
can be transitive too ('inhabit (a place)' instead of 'dwell'),
but even in that case, _sinome_ would not lengthen the last vowel
to mark accusative (unless we're dealing of Book Quenya!). Helge
already suggested to me (see my forwarded post) this translation:

        Nai            lambelya    maruva     sinome.
        may it be that your tongue will dwell here

>
> Generally speaking, I was under the impression that languages that
> decline nouns as widely as Quenya (Russian comes to mind) have very
> few non-declined words, even pronouns usually have different forms for
> different cases.
I don't know that much Russian, but I know it's inflecting, while Quenya
is quite agglutinating, and as with many (most?) agglutinating languages,
affixes are rarely compulsory. Quenya doesn't even bother to distinguish
nominative from accusative; the others are non-core cases (instrumental,
locative, genitive, etc.). So in fact the most important nouns (subject
and object noun phrases) are non-declined.

> I see the question on "hir-" as being, can it be reflexive? E.g.,
> could the subject be the thing being found or the thing doing the
> finding?  More specifically, can it be reflexive when used in the
> "wishing formula"? As in "You language, may it be found here".....
Why would that possibly be?


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/pablo-david/