Kélynrá

Yes, I've made a creation story, or at least started it, at any rate. I was going to link it when it was finished, but it's taken so long to get this much and now real life is getting the way. So, here is the first bit. Eventually, I will translate all of this into Lán, of course, but for now we'll have to stick with English.

Partial creation story is over at writing.com.

I've finally decided how this is going to work. Whew! And I said that the verb system was going to be simple, didn't I...

( New System )

( Verb Inflections )

Because, I feel obligated to post even though I don't really have anything concrete to say. Man, it took livejournal to make me talkative. Most females, you just stick them in a room with a phone and it's love at first sight.

Anyway.

( Names )

( Philosophy and Mythos )

Someday, I will have enough of a language that I will be able to write a creation story, and then this will all make sense. Until then, we have my ramblings.

I finally got some time to update this - I really like this one better, and it'd be nice if I could get a font for it, but I doubt that's actually going to happen. I scanned in a bunch of examples though, so that should do for now, until I get to writing actual things.

( New Yet Improved )

( Examples )

This post has many multiple purposes. I'll get more official things up later, when I have the chance. For now, here's a hodgepodge of what I've been working on.

The official alphabetical order of consonants goes:
β v ð ž š x b p d t g k l r n j w s
The official alphabetical order of vowels goes:
á é ý a e y

In other words - fricatives first, then stops, then prefixes/suffixes, then organized from front to back and with the voiced variants first. Vowels go with the long ones first and from back to front. If I mess up the ordering on updates to the wordlists again, someone kick me.

Actually, I'm redoing the way that the words are alphabetized now that I've gotten an orthography down. I'd really like to be able to make a font out of it, which I keep hearing is incredibly easy but I can never muster the concentration to go through the hassle. Anyone know anyone who makes fonts for lazy people?

Anyway, if I get the font going (or maybe I'll just handwrite it an scan it) than I'll add the actual representation of the words in the orthography into the lists, which'll make it clearer why the alphabetization is the way it is. Each consonant cluster is only represented by one character; the other consonants in the cluster are diacritics of various ilk. The words are organized primarily by the main consonants and only secondarily by the diacritics. Which means that slyv is filed under l (not s) and so on and so forth. There are actually two ways to represent nl, nr, lr, and rl since either of the consonants can be the main character, but all the rest follow a simple set of rules - j, w, and s can't ever be the main consonant, except in the cases of sj and sw where j and w have special consonants that are used as the main one (which come at the end of the alphabet); stops and fricatives can't be diacritics (i.e. they must be full characters) and n cannot be a suffix (only a prefix). I'm considering making meaningful roots out of series' of main consonants (sans diacritical letters) much like Hebrew does with shoreshim (ot? I'm not sure...) - but we'll see.

Naming conventions - names of superanimate things start and end with long vowels; names of animate and inanimate things begin with short vowels and end with long vowels. Anything in a sentence that's explicitly named is treated as superanimate or animate within the structure of the sentence and in any following sentences where the name is implied with a pronoun. If something inanimate that has a name is referred to by a general noun (like saying "the country" as opposed to "America") it's treated as inanimate until it's overtly named.

I was thinking of differentiating inanimate things from dead things (things that were alive at one point but are no longer) since the emphasis is on time as a continuum and thus the past state of something is just as important as it's present condition, but I'm out of ways to end a word and thus mark gender. Perhaps a dead- affix is in order.

Along that train of though, I'm also playing around with religious philosophy. :-D I need to make some more vocabulary and actually get things written in the language.

And, last but not least, I'm very probably getting rid of egylvet (to have). Plenty of languages manage just fine without it, and the structure is confusing to me - the more I think about it, the more it really doesn't make any sense as a verb, especially with an emphasis on timeless existance.

That's all for now.

Updated 1/10/06

( Experiential Verbs )

( Transitive Verbs )

( Intransitive Active Verbs )

( Intransitive Passive Verbs )

( Reflexive Verbs )

Well, in working out my verbs, the roles of the cases seem to have drifted from their intended meanings, so perhaps some renaming is in order. I think I'm going to wind up creating more cases too. Still haven't enacted spelling chnages, so the noun list is still ever so slightly wrong at the moment, but perhaps my lazy ass will fix that eventually. For now, here's a general overveiw of the cases and their functions. I'm sick of lj cuts - I've got this thing organized to within an inch of its life already, so if you're not clicking a link out of the index post or the user info page now, you probably don't care about the spamage anyway. Unless it's on your friend's list. Oh, hell. I'll cut. Dammit.

( Agentive Case )

( Patientive Case )

( Causative Case )

( Instrumental Case )

( Respective Case )

( Genitive Case )

( Stative Case )

( Temporal Case )

( Locative Case )

( Dative Case )

( Allative and Ablative Constructions )

So I poked around and found that Open Office has something Access-like in it, and started a little database for my vocabulary. While I was at it, I decided to go through and mark the verb I had as to which subject/object/argument/etc went into which case with which verb. This is a lot harder than I imagined, especially with reflexive verbs and the allative/ablative constructions. There's actually a lot of transitive verbs that sound patientive when you think about them - so the syntax for, for example, learning, becomes "it learned itself to me". Yay, crazy grammar. Of course, this means you can use the same verb for "it learned itself to me" and "it forgot itself from me" and "it knows itself in me"; and "I am in the state of being x" and "I am becoming x" and "I am no longer x" and "I am" - the number and case of the arguments defines a large part of the meaning of the verb. Crazy, yet concise. I like it. I'm adopting a stance that Genitives are going to work as subject matter or topic of things like saying, thinking, learning, etc when it doesn't logically fit as the patient. Dative is reserved entirely for constructions of "for someone" or "instead of someone" or "for the benefit of someone". A lot of "to someone" constructions are now more logically represented by the allative. Instrumental I think is going to take on the added meaning of "because of..." as well as that of an actual instrument, and probably also Latin's "ablative of means" with abstract ideas like "with joy" or "with a smile". Locative is getting more useful too - it can now mean in a time, in a place, or in a state of mind/being. Ablative no longer means "without" in any sense of the word, since it's now entirely temporal; similarly, allative does not mean "towards". The more I read the list, the more it actually makes sense, so maybe that's a good thing.

I also have started to realize how much more good logical sense this makes than some English constructions. "I change something" - the subject is the initiator of the change, but "I change" - the subject is the thing changed. I'm starting to wonder whoever thought this system was a good idea in the first place - oh, right. Too much conlanging on the brain now.

I will probably write up some huge table with the verbs in it at some point. But at least I have a database now. It would be nice if I actually had Access on this partition so that I could transfer it, but even used it seems like it's going to cost $100+. Jesus. In any case, I changed some of the spellings, so I'm going to have to fix that anyway. When I update some more, I'll actually try to syntactically form some of these constructions. That'll be an adventure.

I need to update my noun list, but I never have the presence of mind to do it. The dictionary I have now runs with MySQL on linux, and since I can't get online with linux I have to make a text file and then throw it over the fence. That's a pain in the butt though. I want to find a linux equivalent to MS Access and use that instead. Then it would at least be in a form that I could easily transfer to, if nothing else, Excell.

When I originally made up the noun list, before I made the hairbrained noun morphology that I just threw out, I had a lot of inanimate nouns ending in -yn. Now that I changed the morphology again, I'm reverting back to the original noun roots for the most part, and reclaiming the -yn's. I think I like this trend - I want to do something with it later. I think there will be fewer -yn's in this bunch, since I tend to like the shorter forms better (šér used to be šéryn, for example). I think the original "nominative" case ending became -yn because I was disappointed at losing the -yn endings on a lot of nouns with the new system - which in turn became the agentive prefix yn-, and the istrumental prefix anj- (and the earlier suffix -nje) came out of a desire to equate n consistantly with something active or initiative. And now it's back to being an affix associated with inanimate objects. It's very tao, really.

No seriously, though - I want to think of a way to relate yn-, -yn, and anj- in some new esoteric way kind of like how I related allative constructions to the future tense. I kind of see this as going in the direction of forces of nature - most of the old nouns I made were for elements and natural phenomena, because I was naming deities and unique and interesting places. Xasryn (from xastryn, from astrý) was originally a volcano, not a mountain, and I had originally wanted the root to indicate the process of the forming of the mountain more than the mountain itself. Now that xasryn refers to non-volcanic mountains, I think the root should have something to do with earthquakes (the word for volcanic mountians would be related to denl- (fire) in all probability). Lyrlyn was a forest, but the forest that I named was one with a mythological penchant for walking trees. Merlyn, I think I have listed somewhere as "voice" or somesuch, but it was originally used to describe a valley of stone which produced tremendously loud echoes. Earth that moves, trees that walk, and stone that speaks. Inanimate objects with animate properties. Myths and legends are imminent. People write stories about things that break their presupposed cosmological rules. The trickster stories of Éský will be about talking rocks.

Oh yay. I've always wanted to revive some of those stories. Now I can write them in Lán. Well, as soon as I get an orthography I like. I need to stylize the one I've got a little more. God, I suck at this part.

Well, here 'tis, finally. Hopefully I won't have to revise it too much more after I spent all this time dreaming it up.

Distinguishing even just between "now" and "not-now" tenses seemed a little superfluous, so now there is only one proper tense, and a prefix indicating subjunctive mood if needed. It seems that the more time I spent working on this, the simpler it gets. If only everything worked that way.

Anyway, time is completely controlled by the postpositions used to create allatives and ablatives with nouns in the locative case. I haven't yet decided if the main verb form is going to agree in gender, number, or person, and if so, whether it agrees with the subject or the agent. Maybe I'll do some more research on Active languages first.

In nouns, the four postpositions work as follows:

loc-city to himself* ag-he go
"He goes to the city" (allative)
loc-home from himself* ag-he go
"He leaves home" (ablative)
loc-box in apple ag-she put
"She puts the apple into the box" (interallative, perhaps?)
loc-hat out rabbit ag-she take
"She takes the rabbit out of the hat" (again, not sure)

(loc- is the locative prefix, and ag- is the agentive)

* NB - going is a reflexive action. I think it's important to make the distinction with a language that marks the do-er and the do-ee, and to specify clearly when they are the same thing.

To, from, in, and out have important uses in verb tenses too. Above, the verbs by themselves translate into English simple present, which is the way they work normally. When they get more complex, they wind up working a bit like English verbs combining particles like "have" and "be" and "will" onto the fronts of them, except significantly simpler. The simple tenses are:

go | "goes"
go to | "will go"
go from | "went"

The concept is that of time as a continuous line of sorts, so an action in the future of the speaker is an action that is going "to" some future point, and an action in the past is one that has come "from" some past point. Similarly, the actual interpretation of the postpositions as used with the nouns is that with "to", the previous adverbial, loc-city or "in the city" will be acheived in the future of the verb. Thus, it doesn't so much mean "going in the direction of the city" as "going, after which he is in the city". And again, "from" only recognizes a state that existed in the past of the verb, before it happened. And if you were going somewhere, and then decided to go somewhere else - well, that's what the subjunctive mood is for. It's also worth noting that the state specified by the locative applies (or will apply, or did apply) only to the patient/experiencer, which is why as I said, it's important to specify with reflexive verbs that the agent is also the patient.

Similarly, going "in" to an action means it's continuous or unfinished, and going "out" of it means it's completed, or perfect.

go in | "is going"
go out | "has gone"

And of course, these can all be combined.

go in to/into | "will be going"
go out to/outto | "will have gone"
go in from/infrom | "was going"
go out from/outfrom | "had gone"

Now it's time to actually get words for these things...

I've been working out a series of changes since I didn't like where things were going so much lately, starting with the new cluster rules. This is the next bit of it. Formerly, I had thought about putting case morphemes on the ends of words and using prepositions in front to represent allative/ablative meanings. I think I'm going to change that around now, and have case-marking on the front of the word and postpositions - mostly because I want the endings of words not to be as uniform and repetitive. It reminds me of Latin a bit too much. Also, previously gender was indicated on the first letter, which seemed a bit awkward to me, and marking number on the end with the cases was a pain. Hopefully this system will yield more pronouncable, and shorter words.

Gender is now marked on the end of the word. A single consonant indicates an inanimate noun, a cluster indicates an animate one, and a vowel refers to a superanimate one. (Clusters can only end a word if they end with a fricative or a stop; vowels can only end if they are long.)

Number is also marked at the end, singular being unmarked, and plural being marked with -á, depending on the type of ending it recieves from its gender:

Inanimate:
xasryn -> xasryná
Animate:
nalðynð -> nalðynðá
Superanimate:
(Since superanimate nouns already end with vowels, their plurals will be formed with the ending vowel shortened plus -lá.
nweðrý -> nweðrylá

Now, as I said, case is marked on the front. I've decided to make this a split-S langauge, with the Agent marked and the Patient/Experiencer unmarked. There are a numnber of noun cases that are marked like this (allative and ablative and probably many others will be covered by postpositions). All nouns begin with consonants, except for names, which always begin with vowels. These prefixes are given vowels as their last letters, but in the case of affixing them to nouns, the vowel is dropped from the affix and retained in the word.

Agentive: an-, ane-
Dative: eðra-
Genitive: ešly-
Respective: ysly-
Locative: exra-
Instrumental: enjy-
Causative: anja-
Temporal: axry-
Stative: ýxre-

Check out the Noun Case Descriptions to see what they mean, exactly.

If the first letter of the word is a vowel or a single consonant that is not a voiceless stop, the Agentive marker can attach without a repetition of the vowel:

anÉsxý
anželá

Latin deems that the case inflection gets put on any possibly-inflected word in the phrase, but this makes the words much longer and the reading more tedious. In Lán, the case-marking falls only on the head of the phrase involved, and not on any modifying adjectives. On the other hand, I don't plan to use adjectives much, as the Stative case will do quite nicely in their stead.

Current Mood: relaxed

This might be subject to change, but for the moment it'll be a good guideline. (I think I forgot two of them - there's actually 116. Boy.)

The old phonology still applies, at least for the moment.

Update 8/31/05: clusters in italics can occur word-initial, and clusters in bold can occur word-final. Clusters in both can, of course, occur in both places, and clusters without either can only occur mid-word.

Legal Clusters

Frequent:
sl, sj, lβ, lv, lð, lž, lš, lx, lj, βr, vr, ðr, žr, šr, xr, βl, vl, ðl, žl, šl, xl, βj, vj, ðj, xj

Moderately Frequent:
rβ, rv, rð, rž, rš, rx, rl, rj, lb, ld, lg, lr, lw, nβ, nv, nð, nž, nš, nx, nl, nj, bl, dl, gl, bj, dj, gj

Less Frequent:
sr, sn, sw, βw, vw, ðw, žw, šw, xw

Somewhat Rare:
rw, lp, lt, lk, nb, nd, ng, nr, nw, pl, tl, kl, pj, tj, kj, br, dr, gr, bw, dw, gw

Fairly Rare:
sβ, sv, sð, sx, pr, tr, kr

Illegal Clusters
rb, rd, rg, np, nt, nk, pw, tw, kw, sp, st, sk, rp, rt, rk, spr, spl, spw, spj, str, stl, stj, stw, skr, skl, skj, skw


Some notes: s + any voiced consonant results in devoicing the consonant, so the rare combinations of s + fricative are all voiceless, and I didn't bother to include s + voice stop anywhere because they have the same status as the related s + unvoiced stop (in this case, the junk heap). n + (β, p, b) sounds like /m/, and n + (x, g, k) sounds like /N/. I've decided to keep sj phonetically and phonemically distinct from š - it sounds better as a combination of two sounds than as a palatalized consonant, I think. Similarly, tj and dj are not pronounced /tS/ and /dZ/ respectively.

At some point I am going to go back and reapportion the clusters in my wordlists currently (and get rid of the illegal ones). There's not a lot of words yet though, so the apportioning should generally happen on its own as I make more.

I counted them the other day, and there are 114 possible consonant clusters according to my rules for cluster formation that I set up originally, and I don't have any kind of schema for which ones are supposed to occur more often, and some of them don't fit with what I had in mind at all. So I went through and scored all the clusters based on what about them I liked and what I didn't. I've completely axed 27 of them, and divided the rest into 5 groups based on how frequent they should be. That'll be handy when I get around to making a word generator that I can customize to my heart's desire. I'll get the actual list up sometime when I have my notebook handy.

Hopefully, the revision will sort out the language and make it sound more like what I had in mind. There are too many stops in it now - and too many unvoiced ones. I know it's probably more natural to have more stops than fricatives (especially since almost all of my fricatives are voiced) but I wanted it to sound heavier and less pretty. I've seen and heard of so many conlangs that are grammatically regular and phonologically pretty that I have the urge to make my first conlang linguistically quirky and not necessarily pretty. I'll probably make a pretty one eventually though.

I'm also going to redo what grammar I have to work with the phonology - no more case endings with stops, which were really bugging me. In fact, I think I'm going to put most of the inflection on the front of the word instead of the back, which will allow me to add shorter affixes without worrying about words ending in vowels or clusters. I could also get away with starting words with vowels, and having any ending vowels represent the gender (instead of beginning ones). I'll work out the specifics later.

Current Mood: creative

I've been meaning to work more on this, I really have. The problem is I'm stuck working out verb tenses and syntax, and I'm not terribly happy with the ideas I have for them at the moment, and I don't want to commit to anything yet. I need some time to poke around at existing systems, but I keep getting caught up in other things (which I go on about over in oracular_rufio...). But I did stop in to neated things up a bit. Now that there are these tag things, which seem more suited to organizing this journal than the memories system, I've gone through and catagorized all, uh, 11? posts with tags. So one thing I did was labeled everything that I'm not happy with or that I want to revisit or work on some more with the "tbc" tag, so that I can find it later when I come back to work on this more actively and forget what I posted. Quite handy, actually. Well, less so considering that I've tbc'd half of the journal. Conlanging is a means sui gratia, no?

Updated 9/19/05

( Roots )

* Jyn is an old root, from when j could stand by itself. Most words with this root will probably be spelled kj- or sj-.

I generated a ton of legal noun roots, and picked the ones I liked. They can (and maybe will) be modified into verb roots if needs be. Until then, I'm storing them here, under the cut, so that I can keep the special letters without having to resort to capitals or doubles.

Reordered and added forms and cluster rating: 11/13/05

( Lots and lots of roots )

Now that I have some time to breathe, I'm going to start working on conlanging again. I have to locate a 50-foot ethernet cable and get my computer hooked up to the network, and then I'll actually have my conlanging materials on the same computer that I can use to post. Since I have a brief outline of what noun and verb roots should look like, I am going to drag out some of my generated worldlists and probably make some more and actually get a vocabulary of sorts going (probably following the Universal Language Dictionary which looks like it would be a good start). Then there are some things I've wanted to play around with once I actually have some words to use them with, including:

- a marker to distinguish a subject compliment adjective from an ordinary adjective
- adverbs, and their uses with verbs (in leiu of tenses)
- prepositions for expressing allative/ablative concepts (in leiu of noun cases)
- more examples of the orthography, and shorthand variations of it
- proper names of people, places, and deities

It would also be nice to get a font of the orthography, but I'm a bit artistically challenged and it would be tough with all the optional diacritics in any case. I see a few people from conlangs have flisted this - do you guys know of anyone who's good at making conscript fonts?

Copied directly from previous journal.

( Orthography )

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( An Extremely Succint Political History... )

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( Verb Morphology )