Re: Pee in the Soup (was: Re: damnable bureaucracy (was: Leaving for a few days))

On Friday 14 September 2001 19:19, Padraic Brown wrote:
> Here's a good one to counter with, which was posted by a fellow
> conlanger (Lionel Bonnetier) over on a.l.a in the midst of the
> wasterel lands of Usenet:
>
> "The gods gave us language, the conlangers give [it] back."
>
tetille antaxóni ke anérji, il aT tetille í ke mataxóníkóni

tetille = SE+past+3p.paucal ('cause it's a group) source + 1p.pl goal
ke is the source marker
il aT means 'and then'
í means 'again, back'
-érj- is the root for god, here in the collective
-taxón- is the root for language, and -taxóník- would mean
constructed language, and -taxóníkón- would be person who constructs
languages. antaxóni, like anérji, is in the collective, which is the
default word for "language". mataxóníkóni is an animate plural.
mataxóníkóni is not a collective, because conlanging is an individual
thing, not a collective endeavor (mostly), but the gods giving us
language is a collective endeavor, or so it seems to the speakers of
Kélen. And, while collectives nearly always take the paucal, plurals
don't usually do so. The paucal in the second tetille is based on the
speaker's observation that conlangers are a small (close-knit)
minority and thus worthy of the paucal.

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

wa jamú anániTa;  (not.be thing.SG one/alone.ADJ)

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html