Re: Sketch: Tatari Faran

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 09:32:06PM +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:25:05 -0700,
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
>
> > Thanks to people on #conlang who gave me good ideas, I've now named my
> > new conlang Tatari Faran, the language of Fara, the volcanic plain.
>
> In what kind of world does it exist?
It's on an undisclosed location on (gasp!) Earth. Fara is completely
surrounded by impassable mountains (at least impassable to its
inhabitants), which are actually stratovolcanoes. As far as its
inhabitants are concerned, that's the extent of the world. They know
not and care not what is beyond the mountains. Their long-forgotten
ancestors may have come from the beyond, according to some ancient
legends in their folklore, but that might as well be outside the
universe for all they know.

(In the future, I may decide to let them develop enough technology to
actually pass the mountains... that would be as great an event to them
as the lunar landing was to us.)


[...]
> > Nouns
> > -----
> >
> > Case system: Tatari Faran's core case system is essentially reduced
> > Ebisédian. There are 3 cases: originative, conveyant, receptive.
> > Besides these core cases, there are the secondary cases: the vocative
> > and the genitive. There is also a special case, tentatively called the
> > absolutive, which is unmarked.
>
> Ah, the legendary Ebisédian case system!  Well, the second time it
> is used it is essentially a rip-off of the first, but of course
> it's your language, so do what feels right to you.
Yes it is a rip-off of the first. But, as I mention in another post,
it is actually more of a redo of the original conception. The
Ebisédian case system done right, if you will. :-)

[...]
> > Another interesting feature of Tatari Faran is in using word order to
> > indicate verbal mood. (Altho Mike Ellis aka DrLurk tells me that it's
> > a case of anadewism, since Finnish apparently does this too. In fact,
> > one can probably argue English does it too.) The first NP in a
> > sentence is always the "subject" [*], and following NP's are
> > arguments.
[...]
>
> Now this is creative!  Expressing mood by word order!  I've never
> seen that before.
It was a happy idea that occurred to me when thinking about whether
Tatari Faran should have a fixed word order. Since the case markers
adequately indicate the semantic roles of NPs, an imposed word order
would serve little in telling NP's apart. But then I thought about
verbs, and realized that word order *could* be very useful there.

Although, for the subjunctive, I think I still need to have some sort
of marker, perhaps a verb inflection, to go with it.


[...]
> > Hope you enjoyed this (gasp) on-topic post, in the spirit of the good
> > ole CONLANG days when people communicated in grammar sketches. ;-)
>
> I did enjoy it.  I also wish back those good old days.  One sees
> too little stuff about actual *conlangs* on CONLANG nowadays,
> and way too many YAEPTs and off-topic posts.
[...]

The reason Rob set up #conlang was so that off-topic discussion could
be moved there. But now it seems that it's *ontopic* discussion that
happens there instead, and the off-topic stuff remains on the list. Oh
well.


T

--
Political correctness: socially-sanctioned hypocrisy.