Flaidish ba7se 7empo

Ghost · Post by **Ghost** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 11:26 am

I like the forming of prefer (morntech) as first-like. So much in fact, that I may have to steal it.

Iscun · Post by **Iscun** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 11:28 am

Speaking of the map, I notice that you can decode the names of the islands with the lexicon:

Bidmory simply means 'monastery'; so I suppose there is an important one on that tiny island? Of what religion?

Mellboor means 'good wine'.

Nammed means 'sunset''.

Mellyez means 'good story'. I'm curious as to how this island got its name.

Vatfa7 means 'olive tree'. That's about as obvious as the second one I decoded.

Liitmech means 'east land'.

I'm unable to find the meanings of Mircaum, Lengesta, or Zandorini. I guess they're all foreign names...

and Zermomech means 'island land'.

Now for the cities:

Syxesteer, as Z noted, means 'king's city'

Kermory means (perhaps) 'garden place'? -mory obviously meaning 'place', and ker (which isn't in the lexicon) being a shortened form of kert, 'garden'?

Tolgron evades me.

Pickapo, as noted by Z, is 'said to be an archaic word for "blessed"'.

Muncham's meaning probably has something to do with the river Munch. Could -am be an archaic affix for 'town'?

Festnap I am confused by. Fest means 'dip', 'daub', or 'paint', and nap is apparently an affix meaning 'day'. You figure it out.

Kodderdex I guess means 'foggy field', kod dex 'fog field'.

Ledley, whatever it means, is known for its porcelain.

Cheentan must mean ' beautiful sea'.

Linchun 'two float'? lin 'two', choon 'float'.

Punteer 'new city'. Finally an easy one!

Emet and ?stacer both start with vowels, so they obviously aren't Flaidish, but I don't know about Tandora, which could mean something like 'out to sea' (taan 'sea', dor 'outside, outward').

As for the rivers, Lassfoy, as noted, means 'slow river'. The others I can't find. The name Flora probably has some really really ancient meaning.

*phew*

By the way, who is the Syx of Flora? Have the Flaids had kings for their entire history?

How far have the Flaids sailed? Have they established any colonies?

Post by **zompist** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 12:58 pm

Good work, Iscun!

Iscun wrote:Bidmory simply means 'monastery'; so I suppose there is an important one on that tiny island? Of what religion?

An Irreanist monastery was founded there about 350 years ago; a town and two smaller monasteries have developed since. The town is one of the few mixed human/flaidish settlements; it's a popular port of call, especially since it's outside the jurisdiction of both Flora and Verduria.

Mellyez means 'good story'. I'm curious as to how this island got its name.

I'm inclined to think it was advertising. Nothing fascinates a flaid more than a good story.

I'm unable to find the meanings of Mircaum, Lengesta, or Zandorini. I guess they're all foreign names...

The first is from Methaiun Miriukaumi 'rich god'; the second is Verdurian 'long summer'. The third is Verdurian in form, but of obscure meaning.

Kermory means (perhaps) 'garden place'? -mory obviously meaning 'place', and ker (which isn't in the lexicon) being a shortened form of kert, 'garden'?

Right.

Tolgron evades me.

It's a worn-down form of 'oak forest' (tolk + groon)

Muncham's meaning probably has something to do with the river Munch. Could -am be an archaic affix for 'town'?

Very likely.

Festnap I am confused by. Fest means 'dip', 'daub', or 'paint', and nap is apparently an affix meaning 'day'. You figure it out.

Yes, it's 'paint-day'; this is the name of a flaidish holiday.

Linchun 'two float'? lin 'two', choon 'float'.

'Second settlement': lint + jund(mory).

Emet and ?stacer both start with vowels, so they obviously aren't Flaidish, but I don't know about Tandora, which could mean something like 'out to sea' (taan 'sea', dor 'outside, outward').

?stacer is Verdurian 'summer-port'; Emet is obscure. It's a human town, bilingual in Kebreni and Verdurian, with the peculiarity that it's merged the two languages syntactically. That is, they use the same syntax for both languages, just change the lexicon. Outsiders find it baffling.

I don't know about Tandora either, and I honestly hadn't noticed the connection to taan, which I like. I think I'll steal that.

By the way, who is the Syx of Flora? Have the Flaids had kings for their entire history?

I'm afraid there isn't one anymore; Flora is a republic. I'm still working on the details; but the flaids are not very hierarchical, and when the kings started getting too domineering they got rid of them.

How far have the Flaids sailed? Have they established any colonies?

They sail to all the ports in eastern Erel?e, as far as Xurno; they rarely cross over to Arc?l. They haven't founded any colonies, but who knows; all this travelling is new for them, and things may change. They never liked to live outside of Flora before, but a small number of sailor families do live in human port cities now.

Post by **zompist** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 3:45 pm

So Haleza Grise wrote:First of, a couple of queries: how are pronouns and other such open monosyllable words pronounced - eg. is se /sE/ or /si:/? Basically, what I'm asking is "which rule takes priority in this case - the final vowel lengthening rule or the rule about monosyllabic vowels being short?

The former; so se is /si/.

Secondly, I know the word tresspo, but what are the Flaidish words for "good" and "evil"? Good is mell, is it not?

Right; and evil is churk.

Oh, and where does Cu?zi pāuriu for "flaid" come from?

It's unknown. It's tempting to wonder if Flaidish f derives from an earlier *p, and that the diphthong has changed-- *plaud seems a lot closer to pāuriu. But there's no corroborating evidence for these posited sound changes.

And finally, a couple of what may be typos, or possibly just my misinterpretation.

You're right on all counts. Thanks for finding those!

Post by **zompist** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 3:56 pm

butsuri wrote:Is this valid Flaidish?
Seer mertse 7y tarjt ko7ys.

Should be tarjet; but otherwise yes, if you meant to say "We want a rock". I don't recognize the ref-- is it a TMBG thing?

The Flaidish metaphor for time is opposite ours. For the flaids, the past is forward; the future is behind.
This isn't quite as alien to English as it appears at first - consider the spatial and temporal meanings of "before" and "after" (although I think the underlying metaphor is different).

I think so too... I think English 'before noon' means that you're proceeding forward into the future, and reach the described event before you reach noon. Flaidish 'in front of noon' means that, as you're looking ahead into the past, you see that the described event is further ahead of you (= further into the past) than noon.

(I had to draw myself a couple of pages of diagrams before getting the Flaidish metaphor straight.)

butsuri · Post by **butsuri** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 4:16 pm

zompist wrote:
butsuri wrote:Is this valid Flaidish?
Seer mertse 7y tarjt ko7ys.
Should be tarjet; but otherwise yes, if you meant to say "We want a rock". I don't recognize the ref-- is it a TMBG thing?

Yes, it's a song on the album Flood. (Nothing particularly relevant to Flaids, but it's the first title I could think of that seemed to present a good chance of being translatable.) Tarj is the correct counter for rocks, then.

DF · Post by DF » Sun Jun 01, 2003 6:47 pm

Okay...what exactly is a 'glottal stop'? And I have to admit I don't like the 7. I keep thinking its an alt-error thing when someone tries to make an alt code that shows up on my computer (like :sh will show up as f67g.'k or something).

butsuri · Post by **butsuri** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 7:00 pm

DarkFantasy wrote:Okay...what exactly is a 'glottal stop'? And I have to admit I don't like the 7. I keep thinking its an alt-error thing when someone tries to make an alt code that shows up on my computer (like :sh will show up as f67g.'k or something).

Well... It's a stop articulated at the glottis. It's like a little cough. If you say "uh-oh", there's a glottal stop between the vowels.

Aidan · Post by **Aidan** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 2:34 am

butsuri wrote:
The Flaidish metaphor for time is opposite ours. For the flaids, the past is forward; the future is behind.
This isn't quite as alien to English as it appears at first - consider the spatial and temporal meanings of "before" and "after" (although I think the underlying metaphor is different).

I've always been fascinated by this ambivalence in correlating temporal and spatial directions. I consider it to be fundamentally driven by the fact that we walk backwards through time: the direction we can see is opposite the direction we're moving.

butsuri wrote:Is this valid Flaidish?
Seer mertse 7y tarjt ko7ys.

Shouldn't it be "tack", not "seer"?

Tack daat fenchen 7y lurmo satter raulor ne.

(Probably a horrid mangling of the language. It's after midnight, I'm sick, and it's the week before finals. So why am I even attempting, you ask? Good Question.)

Raphael · Post by **Raphael** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 9:29 am

Nice language. The tense system is good- not to odd, but innovative. Same goes for the pronouns. (But Verdurian is still probably my favorite conlang).

So Flora is about a hundred kilometers long and at the widest point less than fifty kilometers wide- it must be quiet densely populated then!

I have no intention of actually fully learning a conlang anymore, but I guess as an Irreanist I should know the Flaidish words for the more important terms of that philosophy. Do Irreanist Verdurians use Flaidish words or loanwords when practicing their beliefs?

BTW, you've told us a bit about Flaid-human relations, but how is the relationship between Flaids and Ilii?

Post by **zompist** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 12:17 pm

Raphael wrote:So Flora is about a hundred kilometers long and at the widest point less than fifty kilometers wide- it must be quiet densely populated then!

It is, but I probably overestimated its population earlier. It should probably be no more than 1.5 million.

I have no intention of actually fully learning a conlang anymore, but I guess as an Irreanist I should know the Flaidish words for the more important terms of that philosophy. Do Irreanist Verdurians use Flaidish words or loanwords when practicing their beliefs?

They use Flaidish loanwords, which is enough to give the works a slightly different feeling: the flaids use everyday words (e.g. "good" and "evil"), the Verdurians use opaque loanwords ("mell" vs. "churk").

BTW, you've told us a bit about Flaid-human relations, but how is the relationship between Flaids and Ilii?

More cordial than that between humans and ilii. The flaids view the ilii with great respect. The religious difference is papered over: the ilii consider Irreanism to be on the right track (they equate Good with God). The flaids think they go a bit overhead in taking the names of gods seriously, but they like the stories.

Penelope · Post by **Penelope** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 3:41 pm

butsuri wrote:
The Flaidish metaphor for time is opposite ours. For the flaids, the past is forward; the future is behind.
This isn't quite as alien to English as it appears at first - consider the spatial and temporal meanings of "before" and "after" (although I think the underlying metaphor is different).

Actually, I'm pretty sure that's the Roman view of time as well. I seem to recall a Latin saying which translated as "Look behind" and meant "Plan for the future."

Nice work, Mark. I'll admit I find the 7's annoying and would find apostrophes much more natural for a glottal stop; but that's probably because I've been trying to learn about Hawai'ian some lately. I do love the familiar-but-not-really feel of the language, though.

butsuri · Post by **butsuri** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 4:12 pm

zompist wrote:
butsuri wrote: This isn't quite as alien to English as it appears at first - consider the spatial and temporal meanings of "before" and "after" (although I think the underlying metaphor is different).
I think so too... I think English 'before noon' means that you're proceeding forward into the future, and reach the described event before you reach noon.

Unless I'm missing something here, that's still the temporal sense of "before", and as such a little obvious, ne? I'm thinking of the connection to the sense of "before" as "in front of". The best way I can analyze these in English is that while we, as people, are facing into the future, events are coming the other way, facing into the past. The event is "before noon" spatially in the frame of reference of noon, which is rushing towards us out of the future.

Of course, when you switch back into the frame of a person, you're facing the other way again, into the future, so you can say things like "He saw a bright future stretching before him".

Am I making any sense?
[Edit: Or, conversely, if a succession of things is coming towards you in space, the ones before (in space) will reach you before (in time) the others.]

butsuri · Post by **butsuri** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:00 pm

Aidan wrote:
butsuri wrote:Is this valid Flaidish?
Seer mertse 7y tarjt ko7ys.
Shouldn't it be "tack", not "seer"?

Yes, it should. How did I get that wrong? And how did zompist get it right?

Aidan wrote: Tack daat fenchen 7y lurmo satter raulor ne.

(Probably a horrid mangling of the language. It's after midnight, I'm sick, and it's the week before finals. So why am I even attempting, you ask? Good Question.)

I think mass nouns take the genitive when used with a measure, so it should be satterys. And I guess the measure should be in objective case, lurmot. Otherwise it looks ok to me (assuming you can say "tie x onto y" like that). But what do I know, I can't tell "we" from "you", apparently.

Atanvarno · Post by **Atanvarno** » Wed Jun 04, 2003 3:21 pm

No doubt no one is really intrested in my oppinion, but I really dislike the 7's, surely there's a better alternative... the number 3 on my keyboard at least looks better. Maybe I just like the look of the cyrillic letter З, At least it has a lowercase verson (з)

Aidan · Post by **Aidan** » Wed Jun 04, 2003 3:43 pm

Atanvarno wrote:No doubt no one is really intrested in my oppinion, but I really dislike the 7's, surely there's a better alternative... the number 3 on my keyboard at least looks better. Maybe I just like the look of the cyrillic letter З, At least it has a lowercase verson (з)

But 7 looks like the IPA symbol for a glottal stop, a ? without the dot, more or less. I'm sure that's what prompted Mark to use 7.

Aidan · Post by **Aidan** » Wed Jun 04, 2003 3:47 pm

butsuri wrote:
Aidan wrote: Tack daat fenchen 7y lurmo satter raulor ne.

(Probably a horrid mangling of the language. It's after midnight, I'm sick, and it's the week before finals. So why am I even attempting, you ask? Good Question.)
I think mass nouns take the genitive when used with a measure, so it should be satterys. And I guess the measure should be in objective case, lurmot.

Ah, I figured I was dropping some morphology, but couldn't think my way through it well enough.

butsuri wrote:Otherwise it looks ok to me (assuming you can say "tie x onto y" like that).

My patinet-goal construction was more or less wild-ss guess.

Post by **zompist** » Wed Jun 04, 2003 3:57 pm

Dudes, sorry about the 7's, but it's time to get past it. Apostrophes are extremely evil, the IPA symbol is unavailable, and nothing else is any better. Q is sometimes used as a glottal stop (e.g. in some Austronesian languages), but since I consistently use it for /q/ it's out too. I used ? on the numbers pages, but it's too nasty for a sound as common as the Flaidish <7>, and I use underlining to highlight things anyway.

And yes, the 7 was chosen because it resembles the IPA character. (About the only alternative is 9, which also has the advantage of resembling the actual Flaidish letter; but anyone who dislikes the 7 will probably dislike 9 too.)

I think Unicode is now common enough that I'm using it for newly created pages. Unfortunately the IPA symbols aren't common enough; when they are I'll be able to replace the 7's.

DF · Post by DF » Wed Jun 04, 2003 7:36 pm

I have a question about Flaids in general. This may seem a little...er...odd, but do Flaids really look like the picture(s)? How tall are they? What kind of society do they live in (goverment, politics)?

Wooh...okay...just one answer will do.

Post by **zompist** » Wed Jun 04, 2003 8:43 pm

DarkFantasy wrote:I have a question about Flaids in general. This may seem a little...er...odd, but do Flaids really look like the picture(s)? How tall are they? What kind of society do they live in (goverment, politics)?

The picture on the grammar page is certainly how I picture them today. Note that this is just a nice rendering of the original picture of Jeerio! I haven't tried to look at them biologically.

Verdurian males probably average 5' 6" (apologies to metric users); flaids average about a foot taller. (Ilii average a couple inches taller than flaids, but are much more heavyset.)

Flora used to be a kingdom, but for several centuries it's been a republic.

jburke · Post by **jburke** » Wed Jun 04, 2003 8:53 pm

The picture on the grammar page is certainly how I picture them today. Note that this is just a nice rendering of the original picture of Jeerio! I haven't tried to look at them biologically.

When I first saw the Flaid drawing, I thought they had unitary feet (i.e., were toeless). Is this the case?

Post by **zompist** » Thu Jun 05, 2003 10:41 am

jburke wrote:
The picture on the grammar page is certainly how I picture them today. Note that this is just a nice rendering of the original picture of Jeerio! I haven't tried to look at them biologically.
When I first saw the Flaid drawing, I thought they had unitary feet (i.e., were toeless). Is this the case?

Nah... I drew that back in college, and I still wasn't much good at drawing feet in perspective.

Legros · Post by **Legros** » Thu Jun 05, 2003 4:45 pm

butsuri wrote:I can't think of any natlang written in Roman script as standard with a phonemic glottal stop represented by anything other than an apostrophe.

Somali, which has been written in the Latin alphabet for the last 30 years, uses c for the glottal stop: for instance, the Arabic names 'Abdi and Isma'il are written Cabdi and Ismaaciil in Somali.

butsuri · Post by **butsuri** » Thu Jun 05, 2003 4:59 pm

Legros wrote:Somali, which has been written in the Latin alphabet for the last 30 years, uses c for the glottal stop: for instance, the Arabic names 'Abdi and Isma'il are written Cabdi and Ismaaciil in Somali.

Interesting. A little more research has turned up Nahuatl, which uses <h> (except for <h> before <u>). I briefly thought I'd found one which used <7>, but it turned out to be another conlang.

I'm quite prepared to put up with the 7s myself, but I think Mark's unfairly prejudiced against the apostrophe, possibly as a result of reading too many comics featuring aliens names like M'yri'ah and Z'orr. Saying it looks like punctuation is like criticising "i" because the dot looks like a diacritic.

Post by **zompist** » Thu Jun 05, 2003 5:56 pm

butsuri wrote:Saying it looks like punctuation is like criticising "i" because the dot looks like a diacritic.

Not at all; it means that the eye picks it up as punctuation, it produces interference with actual punctuation, and casual citers will treat it as optional. It simply doesn't look like a letter. As I said earlier, it isn't just me; Arabists are now using half-circles, which stand out more.

And this in addition to the ambiguity of apostrophes, which are used for
-- glottal stops, e.g. in Arabic
-- glottalization, e.g. in Cuzco Quechua
-- palatalization, e.g. in Russian
-- aspiration, e.g. in Wade-Giles Chinese
-- syllable boundaries, e.g. in Pinyin Chinese
-- omissions, e.g. in English and French