Tyl-Sjok (was Re: TRANS: Happiness)

On Monday, October 29, 2001, at 04:20 , Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> writes:
>>
>> i(l) ([i] before a consonant, [il] before a vowel): demand/discovery form
>> y(l) ([i"] before a consonant, [i"l] before a vowel):
>> uncertain/speculative form
>> a(l) ([a] before a consonant, [al] before a vowel): status quo/state form
>>
>> Again, horrendously fuzzy.  I use the symbols
>> !
>> ?
>> .
>
> Ah, ok.  Then this triad is basically the same that you use for other
> systems of the language, like in your posting about structure
> particles.
>
Yes, that's a good way to put it.  Horrendously regular.  I plan to
include some oddball clusters of 2 or 4 just to screw things up.  ^_^

>> (I haven't been consistent in keeping the English definitions all nouns,
>> but since you can verb-ize these nouns using the causative particles, I
>> figure it's no big deal.)
>
> Yeah, I'm used to that since Tyl-Sjok has the same word types as
> Tasratal. :-)
>
:-)

>> Tasratal being pretty new,
>
> Preparing your participation in the new relay? :-) I did not dare to
> go for S4 yet.  I fear too much work... :-)
>
Basically, yeah.  I think the only reason I get away with relatively young,
  unfeatured and ill-tested conlangs in a relay is that I don't yet have
the conlinguistic sophistication to realize all the features that I haven'
t devised yet.  I reckon it's a great way to learn, and man, relays are
just *fun.*  We need another translation exercise though, I don't feel
creative enough to come up with my own right now and I'd love the practice.
   :-)  (Anyone?  Anyone?  I know I missed a bunch in the past....)

> Ok.  Here's a small overview of what I have.  So far, I only have some
> `nice' particles for forming actions and events.  They add aspects to
> the stative lexicon forms.  I made the decision to (mostly) only have
> states in the lexicon, no real actions.  Quite unrealistic from the
> historical
> point of view, of course, but it's an arlang. :-)
>
<G>  Hurrah for artlangs!

> The modifying particles to a state X are the following:
>
>    la X   - inchoative:  to become X
>    lu X   - resultative: to make something X
>    lw X   - durative:    to be in the process of (being) X
>
> E.g. Tyl-Sjok has no base form for `to cook'.  Instead:
>
>    tulu     - to be hot like boiling water
>    la tulu  - to become boiling
>    lu tulu  - to bring to boil
>    lw tulu  - to boil
>
Wow--that's beautifully symmetric.  I like it a lot.

> So that's the basis, but I'd like the system to have particles for
> meanings of entities not only for states and actions.  And these
> should be nice.
>
> I liked your modifiers, because the facets you can have for a base
> noun are really nice, because the meaning is sometimes only slightly
> shifted, providing a fine-grained and seemingly quite regular system.
>
Danke schön.  :-)  I like morphology...the idea of coming up with tons of
words totally from scratch is fun, but also slightly terrifying.  I am an
essentially lazy being....

> In German, there are some prefixes (er-, be-, ver-) to verbs that are
> usually not translated into English, because the shift is so small and
> an English equivalent would be longish.  Yet they are at least a bit
> regular.  But also quite rare, so I can barely find examples...
>
Huh...that's neat.  I hadn't realized that.  (Of course, I suppose there's
a lot you don't realize after a mere year of German, which is now rapidly
deteriorating.)

> E.g.: both `verdreht' and `gedreht' = `turned'.  `verdreht' implies
> that some previous order was destroyed, while `gedreht' only means
> that something was basically turned.  (I don't say you cannot express
> this difference in English, e.g. by a phrasal verb, but the German
> system is so morphological that it is nice for puns without obviously
> expressing the meaning directly).  Tasratal modifiers seem to address
> that issue.
>
:-)  Thanks for the example--I found it very illuminating.

> I'll see what I can do in Tyl-Sjok, which has no morphology.
Hmm.  If you don't want to give it morphology, I guess it *would* have to
be a set of particles or even some sort of syntactical thing.  (I wonder
how you'd systematize that syntactically?)  <pondering>  Definitely want
to see where you go with this.  :-)

Auf wiedertippen,

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

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