Re: O Tuashni Blesha kësh o Kolë

Thomas Weir tilëgë:

> > ...a.k.a. "The North Wind and the Sun" in Choba. I finally got around to
> > translating it.
> Do you think you could give us a short summary of this language's
> phonology and orthography?
I'll try, though as I've said I'm not very good with the X-SAMPA/ASCII-IPA:

a = /a/
e = /E/
i = /i/
o = /o/
u = /u/

Is the symbol /E/ right? In IPA it's an epsilon: open "e" (e.g. in "met")
rather than close "e".
the quality of o varies from open to closed depending on how it comes out
when I try to say something aloud. :-) I guess they're allophones. Choba
speakers wouldn't notice the difference.

/j/-diphthongs are written with diereses:
ä = /aj/
ë = /ej/
ö = /oj/

However, the sequences /aja/, /ejE/ and /ojo/ are written aïa, eïe, oïo.
(But e.g. /ajo/ is written äo, etc.)

The only /w/-diphthong Choba uses is /aw/, written aü.

In "proper" Choba -- if there is such a thing -- ë "should be" /ej/, but
over the years I've found myself turning it into a single close vowel /e/,
so that is, shall we say, a common phenomenon in the everyday colloquial
language.

b = /b/
c = /ts/
d = /d/
f = /f/
g = /g/
h = /h/
ï = /j/
j = /dZ/
k = /k/
l = /l/
m = /m/
n = /n/
p = /p/
qü = /kw/
r = /r/
s = /s/
t = /t/
ü = /w/
v = /v/
x = /x/
z = /z/
ch = /tS/
sh = /S/

Not terribly interesting, I know, but I was 12 when I first started this
language (I'm 31 now) and though it's of course gone through multiple
overhauls over the years, the phonology and orthography have remained fixed,
for the most part. The only changes are that /ej/ ends up being pronounced
/e/ in all but the most careful or formal speech, the addition of the
digraph qü (on purely aesthetic grounds) for /kw/, formerly spelled kü, and
the spelling (again on aesthetic grounds) of /aja/, /ejE/ and /ojo/ as aïa,
eïe, oïo, formerly äa, ëe, öo.

Stress is usually but not always on the penultimate syllable. Stress on any
syllable other than the penult is marked with an accent in dictionaries,
children's books (if there were any), etc., but not in everyday usage.

Note also that the digraphs ch and sh are considered to be separate letters
of the alphabet and come in that order after z.


> > The North-ADJ Wind and the sun argue-PAST about who of them strong-COMP
> > be-PAST when a AGENT-travel in a warm coat wrap-PAST-PASS-ADJ.
> So, it seems that canonical word-order is SOV, but did you leave
> out a verb in the last sentence, "approached"?
Oops! Yes I did. Käge, i.e. kä-gë = come-PAST. Leave it to me to forget the
main, finite verb of the clause! :-)

And yes, the canonical word order is SOV, at least in theory, but in
practice it ends up being somewhat fluid. Simple sentences are nearly always
SOV, but in complex sentences verbs end up getting put in places where my
SVO-wired brain finds they make more sense. For example, a sentence like "I
lost the book which you gave me yesterday" should, theoretically, be "do o
livara pëa to la do döa vëagë munagë", which literally translates as "I the
book-ACC which you to me yesterday gave lost", since the basic sentence is
"do o livara munagë" ("I lost the book") and the relative clause "pë to la
do döa vëagë" ("which you gave to me") is essentially a big adjective.
However, having the conjugated verbs next to each other felt confusing, so
it tends to become "do o livara munagë, pëa to la do döa vëagë" ("I the book
lost, which you to me yesterday gave") or "do munagë o livara pëa to la do
döa vëagë", which totally violates the SOV rule for the main clause but
preserves the integrity of the noun phrase by having the adjective and noun
next to each other, unlike the first alternative which preserves the SOV
order in both clauses but separates the noun from its adjective. I haven't
yet figured out which one I prefer. At one point I tried putting the whole
relative clause before the noun (since adjectives normally precede nouns in
Choba), i.e. "do o pëa to la do döa vëagë livara munagë", but that totally
freaked out my Indo-European brain. Plus it doesn't "feel Choba". Likewise,
a sentence like "I have to go home now", which theoretically should be "do
tero këodomasha meragas dovaga" ("I now homewards go must") ends up being
"do tera dovaga këodomasha meragas" or "do tera dovaga meragas këodomasha".
A simple "I must go" would be "do meragas dovaga", but when the verb has an
object, and even more so if that noun phrase is long or complex (e.g. "I
must read the book which I bought yesterday") I have problems with sticking
the auxilliary, which is the finite verb of the main clause, all the way at
the end, so far from its subject, with one or more other verbs and/or
clauses stuch in front of it.

> > Pëa is the restrictive relative pronoun (as opposed to chu, the
> > unrestrictive relative pronoun).
> Interesting;  I don't know of any language that distinguishes
> these, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.  I like it.
I always liked the distinction in English, though we do it through
punctuation: my aunt who lives in England is 60 years old (but my aunt who
lives in Nebraska is 65) vs. my aunt, who lives in England, is 60 years old
(just additional info, but doesn't distinguish her from any other aunt). I
always got frustrated that other languages I studied didn't make that
distinction, and I remember how much trouble I had trying to explain the
concept to my students years ago when I taught ESL in the Czech Republic. So
I decided to make the distinction very overt in Choba, with completely
separate relative pronouns.

> > The nominal suffix -ra indicates the accusative case.
> A weird coincidence:  this is also precisely the same ending
> in Persian, although in Persian it is only used with definites.
Not a coincidence, actually -- I swiped it from Persian back when I was a
wee lad! :-)

> > The suffix -nos added to adjectives creates nouns meaning "a/the ...
one".

> So, it creates nouns.  This seems to be the stative equivalent
> of your agentive suffix.
Is that what it's called? I didn't know. It's the equivalent of the English
pronoun "one" referring back to something already mentioned, as in "Which
one do you want, the red one or the green one?"

> > Then-the Sun begin-PAST hot-ADV shine-PRES-INF, and the AGENT-travel
> > immediate-ADV the coat-ACC remove-PAST, and the North-ADJ Wind
at_that_time
> > admit-PRES-INF must-PAST that-the Sun strong-COMP than he be-PAST.
> So, is the verb for "must" an auxilliary, or a full verb meaning
> "must be"?
It is an auxilliary "must", which causes the main verb (what's a better term
for that?) to go into the infinitive. For example: "I must go" = do meragas
dovaga (-s being the infinitive ending).

> Overall, a mellifluous language.
Thank you. For years and years it was strictly a written language, which I
thought looked cool, but when I tried actually reading sentences aloud and
so forth, it came out sounding not so nice to my ears. Most of the major
changes over the years, have in fact been in the lexicon -- I've kept
reworking it to make the language sound nicer. The problem was I went too
far in that direction and lost the "Choba character" which had developed
over the years, so I had to go back again and redo things, but to less of an
extreme, and try to "keep it Choba" while trying to keep it softer and more
mellifluous than it originally was.

> However:  I'm not entirely sure
> whether you'd call this a left-branching or a right-branching
> language.  It has elements of both the former (SOV order) and the
> latter (the modifying phrase "wrapped in a warm coat" comes after
> "the traveller", which suggests right-branching tendencies). If
> you altered the syntax to be "the wrapped in a warm coat traveller",
> then it would be more purely left-branching.  (It could be that this
> the way you have it is a result of heavy-phrases being postposed,
> which is naturally in all languages of whatever branchedness.)
Yeah, that's a good question. Noun modifiers (articles, adjectives, etc.)
all precede the nouns they modify, adverbs come before the adjectives they
modify and due to the "supposed to be" SOV word order, adverbs, etc. come
before the verbs they modify. But when there's a long modifier -- a whole
clause, for example, like a relative clause -- then it just doesn't feel
right to put it all before the noun. It "wants" (for lack of a better word)
to come after. Thanks for the response -- it made me think about things!

Regards

Thomas