A new grammar--hurrah!
So Haleza Grise wrote: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.
Matt wrote: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
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