zompist bboard

Technical difficulties overcome!

Anyway, here's the answer:

nm?thk?ld

Do the elcari have those? How do they dispose of their dead?

rijojat confuses me a bit, since an anaphor attached to a noun indicates possession. If you mean 'someone else receives A' you would want moxat rijoj. Ah, so that overrides the experiencer-before-causer order? In that case, I'll edit it to: cheng phimqebat t?t-?ap rij. moxat rijoj ddit b-t?t-gg?t?t...

I've made one of my sporadic returns to composing in Elkar?l. The riddle below is only new to Elkar?l; if you like riddles already you'll probably recognize it. But I was surprised how I managed to create a grammatical parallelism similar to the original's, even while consistently using the action-e...

You provided more information on the Bekkayin states here, in Verdurian, as well. This answer involves caves through mountain ranges.

zompist wrote:A guess on Ihano's riddle: ??muq?

?t!

Bb?th ihanoqebit kh?shoj k?n jel.

(??mit rijxom elkar?l.)

T?t, t?t-j?nat p?m, p-tonat p?m. ( t-nandu -- took me awhile to figure that out. If elcar are so big on riddles, they probably ought to have a word for "answer." But failing that, onat nal-p?m would probably be clearer.) P.S. If my Elkar?l is too ungrammatical, I will parse what I was trying to say....

Well, since nobody besides zomp has chimed in on the riddle yet, I'll proceed with the English version. Being the original, this should be clearer.

I speak to you, but I have no voice.
I am not sharp or heavy, but I am a weapon.
You open me up, but there is only me inside.
What am I?

I'm still thinking about what it is... I'm using nddar for "weapon" (="harmer"); this seems to work. -Is it bad grammar to say t?t-shun rather than sh?n ? For purposes of parallelism I want to say "not heavy" rather than "light." I like nddar for 'weapon'; consider it offically adopted. T?t-shun is...

I tried to make this fit the form of the kh?sh , without as much attention to the difficulty. It might be rather easy, and I'm putting it up partly to find out. Bb?th rij xomaj phimqebat, p-t?t-j?nat p?m. Onat qurd q?l-t?t-barsh p-q?l-t?t-shun, p-q?l-nddar. Pakhdat xib rij, p-onat q?lat. Some lingui...

At some point I intend to tackle the story of the confrontation between Verduria and Dhekhnam, which is probably not too far off (in Almean time). Your mentioning this made me curious... if Almea's technology is roughly 17-18C, with more advanced linguistics and biology, how is its military technol...

Just an observation on the following.

zompist wrote: Fonts have been created to allow printing, but the elcari do not like printed books very much, as they do not allow much differentiation of the characters.

By this token, might they prefer block printing (if that's the right word)?

I love it. I've practiced doing three sentences from the grammar, and I'm amazed at how well you've avoided the pitfall of different vowels or consonants becoming difficult to distinguish. (The only gray area I see so far is the t versus the k; but this may be more my fault in the way I draw.) A que...

7okry kusmod! Sery 7aadickel 7enze nool.

Here's my first exercise in Flaidyx. I was feeling uninspired in what to translate, so I chose the Babel text. Generally I used the NIV, just so to be dealing with simple language. (I was going to put this in the Flaidyx thread, but it came out rather long.) -- (Genesis 11) 1 7y laimeten 7y mootet z...

Shifting variables of that sort would make the book April March by Herbert Quain, as imagined by Borges, rather interesting linguistically.

Thanks for clearing that up. You're right, I know nothing of the debate; I thought of your options (1) would be a very reasonable assumption, but if Sequoyah denied it, we have a whole new can of worms. Also, I had thought you were implying that the whole writing system was from a non-Western antece...

I don't know one way or the other about what Sequoyah himself did or didn't do, but... These characters look completely alien to the Roman alphabet, and indeed to European writing generally; it seems likely that they may be the remains of the earlier syllabary that Sequoyah spoke of. Um, have you ta...

I may be repeating myself, but I remain quite impressed with the Count of Years as it's progressing. One enjoyable aspect is that it's definitely a work of literature as well as being a religious text... not just agglomerated creation, lineages, ordinances, and wars, but a fairly unified work with t...

I wonder how later Cuezians would take details of elcari tasting metal; they'd most probably brush it off with a shake of the head - crazy elcari. Actually, when I read this, I assumed it meant she was biting the gold to test if it was real -- or at least a strange way of saying it. Maybe that's wh...

Early peoples know animals a lot better than most of us do, so I think it very possible that they could observe the economy with which predators hunt. True dat. I think I was confusing the modern period up to the mid-20C, when we didn't know much about ecosystems, with ancient times, when we knew m...

I'm very much enjoying the Count of Years. I was wondering: in the prose parts, did you make for yourself any literary guidelines, like how sentences are structured or such? Let's see, let me think of more questions. OK: in Cuzeian religion, what religous/sociological role did or does the Count of Y...

I'm not understanding these two lines, though... where do the fox and crow come from? To be frank, I don't understand them either. But after all, this is, I think, from the Western Zhou period, over three thousand years old, and a folk song -- on a somewhat similar level of ancientness with those S...

Okay, here we go. This is Ode 41 of the Shijing, the Chinese Book of Songs. Its common title is "The North Wind." I've used object anaphora without assigning them, because the situation was meant to be intimate (probably assignment would be done beforehand), and we have no names on which to assign a...

To my great surprise, I found an actual specimen of Earthly literature (well, sort of) that can be translated into Elkar?l. I've got everything done, except for one stumbling block: I can't find any way to express speed in the language! This seems to be to be something well-suited to variability, wh...

Here's what I plan to work it into. It's not especially funny, but it's longer than what I've done before and the vocabulary isn't too demanding. Xil Motqichqebot q?l-t?gu ?Tarkhumqebat b?dot. Phurd mbam ng?l durdat. Moxot b?chiq tbopshdat. Qith b?chiq dutat. Bb?that bb? on b???ng. On [insect] q?l-q...