Long Wer -- General remarks

LW is a highly aggluginating language with a lot of cases, tenses and vowel
harmony. The order of the sounds of a (usually shorter prefix/suffix/infix)
word is even confusable to sound more beautiful. And they have a regular(ized)
but difficult writing system so when you hear LW you can imagine yourself
dropped into a world ruled over by well-sounding, precise and rather shaded
meanings and concepts you've never heard of. But I hope it's worthy to examine
that for seeing the background of Hia and Mau (Day One will soon avaliable at
my Hia and Mau Online) or just to feel the Mind of Cat.

_HISTORY IN LINES_
LW have developed from archaic Meyadhew a lang spoken by the mammals of our Earth
some millions of years ago. Once upon a time, a feline (not strictly cat but
from a prehistoric feline race) genius Noyah /nojAh/ (her name means: Creator)
came up with the idea: why write down all the sounds of a word if a hundred of
signs representing the meaning or the sounding of the most common words can
abbreviate the forms. The cats quickly accepted her idea but the other animals
didn't because they were afraid that if the writing becomes more difficult,
stupider animals can't learn it and the general knowledge will become a
privilege of the more intelligent races (or persons). Cats didn't worry about
that and in response to those concerns they bringed in the habit of the
educating of cubs. And Noyah created a bunch of abbrevations of the commonest
pronouns, case marking words to build into the words. (In that time Meyadhew
where a highly isolating lang. with very elaborate ways of expre!
ssing things.) Noyah's aggluginations bringed a little colour into the dialect of
cats which slowly evolved into a different language.
Note: the same happened to the armadillos. When Hia became a linguist scribe (he was
a sort of genius too) he decided to develop a language for his people. He
couldn't totally get across his idea but the dillos slowly began to evolve on
their own way and around 4700 AC (after the Convent) ( ~2200 AD) they have
their own dialect clearly different from the south dialect of Meyadhew. And it
was a very fast change because Hia has born in AC 4443, 1999 AD and created his
language in the 50's AC.

_WORD FORMING_
LW have around 250 roots and basic Noyahian hieroglyphs. These can be combined
simply putting the words together, for that, according to the cowel harmony, if
the ending consonant of the first and the beginning consonant.of the second
word forms a cluster not allowed in LW we have to insert an 'attaching sound',
'o' if there're more back vowels (the word is back-ordered [ translation of a
hungarian term meaning which class of vowels are in majority in the word {front
or back}, I'll use it in LW to shorten things ] ) than front or 'i' if there're
more front (words with equal front and back vowels can go either but they're
usually considered as back-ordered). But that juxtapositions are rather a
characteristic of the words formed by derived words. The root words usually
contain a primary word which remains (almost) intact and a secondary which is
divided into its vowels or simply shortened to a part of it and
prefixed/infixed/suffixed (in)to the primary root. I.e: BWA "comple!
x" + AMON "hide" = bwamon "enigma". AMON is the primary root and BWA is the
secondary. Here the a of BWA was simply dropped out.
There's a more weird example: AN+NGO = "family"+"male" = angon "father". Here an was
divided and prefixed-suffixed around the primary root.
Of course these almost always applies to words formed directly from the roots in
an early stage of LW's evolution. When forming new words from derived words you
use juxtaposition like this: runomau (little cat)
with an attaching vowel 'o' because the words 'run' and 'mau' are back-ordered and
the cluster 'nm' is not permitted in LW. The word runihíe with an 'i' istead
of 'o' is an unusual form, rather slangy, used by Mau only, guying an old cat
chant. The original first line of the poem is the following: "Áya, runiméye,
qahére hweuryen" "Hey, little sister, wait for my words" (qaher is "to wait"
hwe = "sound", u is a plural marker rye is a variant of ir [genitive 'i' "I"],
[i often changes to 'ye'] and also a dimunutive but here that's a posessive
ending n is the accusative ending.) but also has a variant "Áya runiméye,
neti qen te-sfie".

_GENDER_
LW have to natural gender classes, feminine and masculine. This distinction is
being applied according to the meaning of the word so not all of the words have
an unchangable gender like French words. Of course there are the
natural-gendered words meaning a male or female creature and there are some
meaning classes which have male gender (male because the basic, unmarked gender
is -- weirdly -- female). So the names of the natural elements (eg.: sun,
storm), human-made things (eg.: computer etc.) and time concepts (like past,
hour etc.) are always males. All other nouns are female but can transform into
the other with vowel changes.
        a --->  i       (only at the end of words)
        e       remains e
        i --->  y       (or ye/yi//ey/iy//eye/iye/iyi if y forms an unpermitted cluster)
        o --->  w       (or wa/aw/awa)
        u --->  w       (or we/ew/ewe)
If the vowel is long then if changes to vowel the resulting vowel remains long or
if changes to a weak consonant and an attaching vowel follows/precends the
consonant it shound be lengthened too. Otherwise it hides.
Examples for male transformation > Quala (the Great Convent) >> Qwali, hia >> heyi or
hiyi 'cuz hy is not permitted.
An irregular change is: mau >> miw. (middle 'a' changes to 'i')
Nouns containing only 'e'-s are staying unchanged during male transformation.

_NUMBER_
LW nouns, adjectives and verbs have three numbers: singular, dual and plural.
They indicates the dual form as -i for words ending in a consonant (or vowels
except 'i') or -y for words ending in 'i' (or alternatively any vowels). The
plural sign are -u and -w (for words ending in 'u' or an alternative marking
for vowel-ending words) (well, they use those semi-vowels 'y' and 'w' for many
things)
--
Mau
Ábrahám Zsófia alias Mau Rauszer
    |  http://hiaandmau.host.sk  |
"Yú lawe ta mau taqe yibali amis qi ú neb dagu tawiy iq." -- Kipling