The other day there was an exchange on the Conlang mailing list
about hidden references to Tolkien in people’s conlangs.
Garth Wallace wrote:
Daniel Bowman wrote: » For example, Samadurian actually
comes » from mangling “cellar door”, > Is that a hidden
reference to Tolkien? ;-)
Yes indeed! That’s the only relation, though; the milieu it’s
intended for is very un-Tolkeinesque.
To which I replied:
mercurii
dies ‘Wednesday’
used to be melcordí in Rhodrese, which of course was
an oblique reference to Tolkien (and one which Tolkien would
perhaps not have liked very much!). In the current version of the
lang the form is meocordí, and thus not that obvious
anymore, if you aren’t aware of the change of non-prevocalic /l/ to
/w/.
Ah, creative help! The mention of **melcordí gave
me a flash of inspiration today how to explain that Rhodanu becomes Rhuodre
rather than **Rhuorn or **Rhuorre and
Rhodanense >
rhodray rather than **rhornay or
**rhorray, and so be able to keep the current name of the
Rhodrese language without introducing an exception or
inconsistencies or implausibilities in the historical
phonology.
(more…)
Mærik also uses active/passive participles
as agent/patient nouns but it uses zero
derivation, i.e. just uses the participle as a
noun without further ado. From the POW of Mærik
itself there is no ‘double meaning’; that
lekartan can or must sometimes be translated as
‘the one who is speaking’ and sometimes as ‘the
speaker’ is a complication of English grammar
which is simply absent in Mærik grammar. (more…)
In the shower one day I had a flash of inspiration
and finally knew how Kijeb tense-aspect-mood
marking should be organized. I’ll try to manage
to describe it without access to my dictionary.
Many aspects (sic!) of the following wholly or
partly obsoletize things said on the Kijeb page
on FrathWiki.
(more…)
On Conlang Herrig Thaillí (Henrik Theilling) wrote in response to me:
I’m ATM in woes WRT the Rhodrese indefinite article. I feel that the changes I’ve made to the feminine indefinite and plural definite forms call for a change in the plural indefinite as well. Consider the following patterns:
|
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
| def.
| el |
el |
la |
l’ |
li |
gl’ |
| indef.
| un |
un |
na |
n’ |
eun |
eun |
OR
|
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
| def.
| el |
el |
la |
l’ |
li |
gl’ |
| indef.
| un |
un |
na |
n’ |
ni |
gn’ |
Is the latter preferable or am I over-regularizing?
NB eun would still mean ‘some, a few’, while aocú means ‘some, any’ and naocú means ‘not any, none’.
My gut feeling for Rhodese is that the first alternative is more like it. It has that nice vowel change. And the system should not be made too regular I think.
(more…)
Some while ago I had to change my mind on the
shape of the plural definite article in Rhodrese.
Ever since the inception of the lang I’d thought
the plural definite article was il, but with the
rule that unstressed e and unstressed i are
pronounced alike as [ɪ] a
plural il would be homophonous with the
masculine el, and I can clearly not have that!
Better then to have the plural article as li,
with the prepositions + article contractions
becoming dilli, alli, polli etc. Needless to say
the plural article before words beginning in a
vowel remains gl’.
This also offers a clue to the demise of distinct
feminine forms, for surely the feminine plural
article was originally le but became homophonous
with the masculine li. The abolition of le was
surely one of Bernual’s reforms.
(more…)
