Lenani is up

[So Haleza Grise]

lenani is up lenani is up lenani is up - hurray! - I can't believe I'm the first one to notice!

[So Haleza Grise]

The retroflexes aren't displaying for me unfortunately .

Some typos -

Phonology: "OS some formidable consonant clusters" - missing word.
Possesive suffixes and pronouns: "your (s. f) dance" is incorrectly glossed as "her dance".

[pharazon]

How the hell'd you notice that? There isn't even a link yet that I can see (not that the filename is hard to figure out).

[So Haleza Grise]

How the hell'd you notice that? There isn't even a link yet that I can see (not that the filename is hard to figure out).

Out of idle curiosity, I followed the link from the Skourene culture test. . .

[valinta]

Very cool. Interestingly, the background color is so close to my highlight color that I can't tell when I've highlighted text.

According to a thread about the dotted consonants, here's the situation:

Mac OS: Can display all of them anywhere.
Windows (non-IE): You need to download a font like Gentium.
Windows (IE): Get another browser, and install the font.

[Delthayre]

I've been waiting for this for some time. I'm quite fond of the Skourenes and I've been curious about their language for a while.

I've only read a little, but it seems to promise some intriguing substance. I like the natural gender with a four-way distinction.

The retroflexes are displaying for me (Firefox), all though the lower-case styled but upper-case sized retroflex voiceless dental stop will take a little getting used too.

[Mecislau]

Okay, some parts of this are scarily like my [still-in-the-making] Ņaranis grammar... Triconsonantal Roots, Erg-Abs structure, four cases (though not quite the same), animate (subdivided into masculine and feminine) versus inanimate genders (though I also have a divine), morphological negative, suffixed definite articles (hey, mine are in -l too!) heck, even the consonantal phonology is almost exactly the same!


I'll need some more time to read through everything, though, but from my quick skim it looks pretty good!



Minor Typo: Under the list of derivatives for the root *narş-, you suddenly switch to ? (s-hacek) in the word "nor?is". I don't think that this was intended, seeing as all other uses of s-hacek were proper names.

[valinta]

the lower-case styled but upper-case sized retroflex voiceless dental stop will take a little getting used too.

What?

[Delthayre]

the lower-case styled but upper-case sized retroflex voiceless dental stop will take a little getting used too.

What?

Your mother.

I guess Firefox must be having display issues, because all of the retroflexes are showing up as somewhat oversized. They're shaped like lower case letters, but with upper case proportions.

[Pabappa]

Doulos SIL works well for me in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

EDIT: If anyone is confused, I stole my username from the name in Skourene, not the other way around.

[valinta]

I guess Firefox must be having display issues, because all of the retroflexes are showing up as somewhat oversized. They're shaped like lower case letters, but with upper case proportions.

I think that's happened to me with Gecko-based browsers before(namely Camino). They never did seem to be as good at text display as WebKit-based browsers.

[Matt]

This is fantastic. Is this the longest Almean grammar to date?

Okay, some parts of this are scarily like my [still-in-the-making] Ņaranis grammar

Parts of it remind me of my own Takela:

-Most nouns, including everyday words, are derived from verbs; there are standalone nouns, but these form a small closed class.
-There is no subordination per se; instead, OS uses a wide array of conjunctions.

And the consonants are exactly like those in Etskan (the first draft of Takela) with the addition of labials.

I guess Firefox must be having display issues

It's working fine for me.

[Glenn]

A new grammar--hurrah!

Out of idle curiosity, I followed the link from the Skourene culture test. . .

Amazing--I was just casting a wary eye at that link the other day...

Overall, Mark, I'd say that this is quite intriguing stuff; you certainly seem to be carrying out your promise to make the languages less familiar to English-speakers (and more broadly, IE-language speakers) as the distance from Verduria increases. I appreciated the explanations of the ergative-absolutive system and the manner in which the triconsonantal roots work (if I ever make use of either in a conlang, I'm going to have to refrain from the temptation to simply steal ideas from you and others...). Other features that struck me included the system of verbal moods and the extensive verbal prefixes, as well as the connectors and the locative verbs (by the time I got to them, I was already wondering how Old Skourene handled prepositions--or not, as it turns out). Finally, I was pleased to note that the four-gender system, identified so long ago on the Proto-Eastern page as a feature of the Lenani-Littoral family, at last made an appearance.

EDIT: I've just finished reading the sample texts and the comments on the Skourene writing system. As usual, I found the most interesting part of the samples to be their possible reflections on Skourene culture (found as much in the accompanying commentary as in the texts themselves). The writing system was also quite intriguing--the lexeme + syllabic system is a fairly logical one for a consonantal-root language, and one I hadn't thought that much about before.

Incidentally, apart from ş, my browser had trouble with the retroflexes, but I expected that, since I know it's not fully Unicode-capable yet. Mysteriously enough, however, ŧ popped up successfully exactly once.

A couple of minor typos I caught in the "Ergativity" section:

1. In the examples "I danced" and "I hit my brother", the ergative/absolutive color scheme is reversed.

2. In the second-to-last sentence in the section, "ergative -u" should be "absolutive -u", as in the preceding examples.

There may be other typos (in addition to those caught by SHG), but I'll leave them for others to find.

Is this the longest Almean grammar to date?

I didn't think so at first, but... It's certainly one of the longer Almean grammars, along with Verdurian, Axunashin, and Flaidish, and it's probably the longest single page, since the Lexicon is located on the same page as the grammatical sketch, rather than on a separate page, as in several of the other grammars.

[EDIT: I see that Mark changed this last bit in the revised version of the grammar; the lexicon is on a separate page now.]

(In terms of the largest amount of material online, Verdurian still takes first place, if one includes the grammar itself, associated material (such as the Practical Course), and the extensive Verdurian dictionaries.)

All in all, a very interesting addition to Almea's linguistic landscape, Mark--thanks again!

p@,
Glenn

[Drydic]

/me drools


I guess I didn't jinx it as badly as I had thought...

[Herra Ratatoskr]

Cool consonantal root structure, nice phonology, I like it. Nice to see Almea keep on growing.

[zompist]

lenani is up lenani is up lenani is up - hurray! - I can't believe I'm the first one to notice!

Heh, I had it up for testing, but I wondered if anyone was loading lenani.htm periodically. Well, no problem.

I just uploaded some corrections, including that lumpish specification of the Gentium font for Windows. There's a link in the text to the Gentium download page.

There's something of an easter egg inherent in Old Skourene. It's something that's easy to guess but hard to prove. Because of this you don't get points for guessing, and I won't confirm or deny guesses.

[Piero]

charmin... i'm... fascinated

[aardwolf]

i really like the mood and aspect system.
(the retroflexes dont show on my work's Windows IE..)
the conjugating program looks really useful, and is fun to mess with (see what it does to your name)

Le meas,
Conor

[Zerrakhi]

The first thing that leapt out at me was a very convenient mnemonic for one item in the lexicon (for fans of British science fiction).

http://www.varos.net/doctorwho/databank/diary/Aggedor/

[Piero]

What's your next project, Mark

[Twpsyn Pentref]

That's unbelievable! It makes me so sad; all my previous efforts seem to be crumbling to miserable little heaps of dust now... ( )

[Mecislau]

One quick question:

trga You don?t/didn?t/won?t fall

[...]

Some imperatives are unpronounceable even by the facile-tongued Skourenes; in this case an epenthetic -u- may be inserted in P12, as in the last two samples.

[...]

uturga Fall!

What makes a medial /trg/ so much more difficult than an initial one? If anything I'd kinda expect the "trga" to take an epenthetic vowel instead of *utrga.

[Dewrad]

:eviscerates self and sacrifices own entrails to Zomp as a burnt offering:

[alice]

When Laura Nyro died, a bunch of artists recorded some of her songs to make a tribute album; the results were described by one reviewer as something like "several dwarves partying at the feet of a giant with they were not fit to share the same air". This is how I feel everytime Mark puts up something new Especially since my current project is my first ergative language!

[chris_notts]

Especially since my current project is my first ergative language!

Cool. Have you made a thread about it?