Re: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language

Reading these posts, I realized that an issue I have been debating in Jases
Lalal--the order in which the letter modifiers appear--is really a matter of
hierarchy of classes--e.g.
babab-=man >babar=warrior>barax=commander (actually, in standard Jases at
present, "babab" has come to mean "I," but what I gave above is the etymology.)
Here "b"  as a letter is associated with humans, "r" is a associated with war
and related concepts, and x is associated with rulership and related
concepts, so man-war-ruler
is commander, general.
Originally I intended that the modifiers should always follow the root as in
the above example, but in the course of developing the language I became
inconsistent on this, so
some are in the order given in the barax example and others have the modifers
before the root--e.g. xamab  where the derivation is babab man>mabab
sailor>xamab admiral
where b and x have the values above and m is water and related concepts.

Very  recently I began to design a more consistent language derived from
Jases Lalal,
Lalat Sesej,  which among other things follows the original rule that
modifiers follow the root very strictly. It also generalizes from this the additional
rule that adjectives and possessives follow the nouns they modify, which has
never been true in Jases Lalal before.

One inconsistency with this rule in at least my first Lalat text: the plural
has always been indicated by -h after the noun, but in Lalat the h-became a
prefix, and is applied not only to plural nouns but to adjectives modifying
them.  Changing the plueal marker to a prefix was part of the never-ending quest
of the Jases grammarians to differentiate their language from Rihana-ye (where
the plural is the suffix -fe).

Incidentally, the other changes in Lalat are intended for non-conhistorical
aesthetic reasons--readers had commented on the predominance of 2 syllable
words; adding the plural prefix to adjectives will make many of them three
syllables. I also decided to adopt from Nalal (informal spoken Jases Lalal) the
custom that words ending in two consecutive same consonants will drop the second
e.g. kavav becomes kav '. I extended that rule to words beginning with 2
consectuve same consonants, which would drop the first, e.g. baban becomes ' ban. In
the written form I mark the omitted letter with apostrophe before or after the
remaining letters to differentiate such examples as former baban >' ban
(meaning son) from former banan>ban ' (meaning grandson.) though they may fall
together in the spoken form.
As Jases Lalal had a predominance of the vowel a (used in all syllables of
the nominative and pre-final syllables in other cases of nouns,  the same in
adjectives modifying these nouns, and the 3rd person of verbs) , I decided in
Lalat
in nouns (and their modifiers) in cases other than the nominative all the
vowels would change instead of  just the final vowel.  Thus in the word Jases
("of the fatherland") the genitive was marked by the e in the final syllable, but
in the Lalat equivalent Sesej both syllables have -e (the the modifying j for
father comes at the end.)


Much of the rest of the language remains the same.  As I have been generating
a number of texts in Jases, I do not intend to abandon it; I think Lalat
(which can mean with "4th Language" or "Beautiful Language")  will become a
special sacred literary form used by the priesthood of the sole Jases Fathergod.

My apologies for wandering rather far from the initial topic.
John Leland