Re: Minhyan & the goddess of conlangs

Roger Mills wrote:

>A possible omission or oversight (?)-- "j" [Z] is given in the phonology
>section, but looking quickly thru the lexicon, I didn't see a single
>instance of it.
Thanks -- good point.  I've removed [Z] and re-spelled [S] as 'j' instead of
'jj'.  After all, IIRC, /S/ occurs in Welsh, while /Z/ doesn't, and Sindarin
was inspired in part by Welsh (Sindarin inspired Minhyan phonology).



David Pérez :-) wrote:

>My, but you are in industrious!   And you did all this in just one >hour?
No, I did it all in an hour or two A DAY for eight days: so 12 hours or so.



>(1) You give an example of the word for "jail", which I'll copy out:
>litehomigir [< lir , "free" & - te -, "opposite" & - ho -, "small-item"
>& -mi-, "person" & -gi-, "place".] n. Prison, gaol, jail.
>So what is a "litehomir"?   Jailer?   Prisoner?
Prisoner -- it's already in the lexicon. :-)


>Also, why is there a "small-item" suffix in there?
Normally I'm quite perfectionist about the semantic straightforwardness of
my etymologies.  However, for Minnhyan, I decided that not all the word
derivations would be logical -- see below.



>(2) Hey, we were just discussing languages where the indefinite is
>marked and the definite isn't.   Minhyan appears to be such a language.
Interesting coincidence.  I had actually chosen this approach but not yet
used it for a revision of Dublex.  I didn't mark the definite simply because
in an English word count "the" was more common then "a" and "an", so I
thought this would be give me more concise texts.



>(3) What you did with the question words is *really* neat.
Thanks!



>(4) The order of cases in a sentence and the order in which they're presented
>is identical.
Yes, for the six most common cases, but the vocative (listed last) is the
only case to proceed the verb.

I arranged the paradigm that way for consistency but didn't feel like I
could list vocative first.



>(5) I don't really get your interlinears in the texts section...
>Could you perhaps explain one of the sentences?
Perhaps the tricky part is that the infixes can be difficult to parse:

Mathiffo, ama garaha calapan lubewad.

Mathi/-ffo, ama gara-ha calan/-pa- lubed/-wa-.

Mathi/VOCATIVE-DEFINITE, love/INDICATIVE-IMPERFECTIVE I/AGENTIVE-SINGULAR
you/PATIENTIVE-SINGULAR also/ABLATIVE-DEFINITE.

I love you too, Mathi.


I need to flesh out the grammar with more sample sentences.



>Looks great!   Good work!   (P.S.: How did you create *so* many
>words in such a short amount of time *and* put them all up on
>the web?)
If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the
shoulders of microprocessors!

I wrote a program to analyze the Esperanto words of the Ergane dictionary
(which is public domain), parsing them into possible infix and affix series.
 So it would convert _frizistino_ "hairdresser into "friz|ist|in|o", which
it translated into:

  tuurona [< tuw, "hair-do" & -ro-, "professional" & -na-, "female".] n.
Hairdresser, female hairdresser.

Of course, it would also do crazy things like:

  machorab [< mab, "beard" & -cho-, "collection" & -<i>ra</i>-, "doctrine".]
n. Barbarism.

Perhaps barbarism is a doctrine of collecting the beards of slain enemies?

These false analyses are a known problem with Esperanto's word formation,
which is ambiguous.  The most famous example (from Don Harlow's site) is
'misiloj', "missiles", which could be analyzed as "mis-il-o-j", "tools that
miss"!

My justification for these etymologies in the world of my language is listed
at the top of the lexicon (http://www.langmaker.com/minhlex.htm).

Basically this method of lexical derivation was something I had always
wanted to try, but I knew it would take too long to correct the etymologies
for an engelang (my usual field of conlanging).  It worked out great for an
artlang, though.


Best regards,

Jeffrey

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