zompist bboard

is finally done.

http://www.zompist.com/xurnash.htm

Endajué is pretty far along too, but Xurnese won the race. A very long race: my first description of Endajué goes back to about 1979, and the first version of the Xurnese grammar to 1988.

And while I was at it, I updated the Sounds page:

http://www.zompist.com/almeasounds.htm

I am happy.

That is all.

It came.
It saw.
It pwned greatly.

Read through the entire thing, and I just gotta say...
damn!

Nice job Zomp. Nay, excellent job. The Semantics and Pragmatics sections were particularly cool. I look forward to seeing the "runner-up" in that race of yours.

I'm confused though. . . the map seems to imply there are two Liraus?

Rizunyo!

Somehow, among all Almean languages, the one I really would like to learn

This is once again good work - rock on! Xurno is my favourite Almean country, and I always wanted to read about its language.

So Haleza Grise wrote:I'm confused though. . . the map seems to imply there are two Liraus?

It may indeed be a mistake, but need not. Place names are not necessarily unique. For example, in Germany, there are two cities named Frankfurt.

Wow! Congratulations! I will comment more insightfully after reading it.

I'm reading it now - I hope you don't mind if I post questions, comments or what I think are typos along the way?

1) In the plurals table, you have:
-r // -ú; from the example it ought to be -rú ?
For -u // -ú your example is says // saysú, with no "u" in the sg.

2) Is "yes, yes, oyes" in the forms of the modern 2sg. pronoun an intended joke?

3) For the sufixes, you list:

-audo following a syllable containing a front vowel

with one of the examples being baus > busaudo ?

4) For the suffix -ri you state that it froms present participles, but one example is

brešuac develop → brešuatri advanced

which looks more like a past (or perfective) participle.

5) How are ordinals of higher numbers formed, e.g. 564th? Is only the last number ordinalised (like in most IE languages), or all elements? What are the ordinals of sigac and ezir?

That's all for today.

So Haleza Grise wrote:I'm confused though. . . the map seems to imply there are two Liraus?

I misread my paper map. The city in Šuzep is Lidau, the one in the delta is Lirau. (Compare to ancient Leidau, Leirau respectively.)

I'll respond to Hans-Werner's questions a bit later.

Your RSS feed links to http://www.zompist.com/xurnash.[b]html[/b] rather than .htm, resulting in a 404 error.

Otherwise, fantastic job. Certainly it's one of the best (and first) semantics and pragmatics sections I've ever seen a conlanger grapple with. Makes me want to get back in the swing of conlanging.

I'm getting a kind of Persian/Brazilian Portuguese-y vibe from it. This pleases me.

Also:

Cu mul buma na pečrešey xauč šu!

Having problems getting something published ?

All I can say is... congratulations! I'm glad it's done... and given the long time it took, it obviously had a lot of work put into it!

I liked the remark about how Xurnese was used as an argument against the relation of languages. Kinda reminds me how the British would taunt the Grimm brothers about Gaelic. (Incidentally, the female patronymics are close to the Irish female form of O', which is Ni/Nic/Nig.)

Or, in my case, how frightening the Slavic languages look to beginners. Especially Polish, which looks scary as hell for people raised on Western European languages. And it's interesting how both Xurnese and Polish seem to be heavy on hissing sounds such as sh, ch, ts, and so forth. I expect the Grimm brothers got more than their fair share of Germans who swore that Polish could NOT possibly be related to German in any way...

(Barakhinei, not Xurnese, instead actually makes me think of Portuguese/Persian. The Xurnese verb conjugation system does seem rather Portuguese-like, particularly with the loss of the second person forms, but otherwise... and I could go on a long rant about the B-V merger in Spanish. How I want to change their orthography to things like ber, bolar, beinte, Beracruz, escrivir, havlava...)

Made a few corrections. Thanks, keep 'em coming.

The ordinals for sigac and ezir are sigatri and eziri.

Brešuatri is rather a neat word; it's originally a military term meaning 'moving as a vanguard'.

*Speechless*

If it wouldn't kill you how would one say and write boingy in Xurnese? And I'm happy that it's up! More script examples please! It's so pretty!

YAY!

I think I've found a couple more typos.

Under Syntax: Noun phrases:

cu xaney na nue: "the cat who fishes" should be cu xande na nue. Xaney is "fishes" noun plural.

And xaup tes xumi: "men without hats" should be xauvisi tes xumi. I'm not sure what xaup is, but "hats" is xauvisi.

Incidentally, what's the Xurnese for "friend"?

EDIT: Found it. pešayc.

What is the inspiration for the inherently negative verbs? Is there a natural language that inspired you in this or is just your own thing?

Caught this:

rešeji ‘looked’ [re 'se dʒi] -- IPA wrong?

BTW, I like this:

"Some, due to piled up sound changes, are entirely opaque: ayu ‘owl’ → wiw;"

Kinda reminded me of the French for 'eye' (oeil > yeux). Or is yeux in fact descended from Latin oculi??

Good catches, Mornche, thanks. Those are corrected now.

And you're right about the IPA, BGMan-- I'll get that next time.

I like things like ayu → wiw myself; the fun thing is when they come neatly out of the sound changes.

roninbodhisattva wrote:What is the inspiration for the inherently negative verbs? Is there a natural language that inspired you in this or is just your own thing?

Negative moods for verbs, as in Axunašin, are common enough-- Japanese is an example. And retaining just a few remnants of an earlier inflectional category is common too (e.g. the English subjunctive showing up only in one verb; Latin having a locative for just a few words). It seemed pretty easy to put the two ideas together.

(For that matter, there are examples of inherently negative verbs-- Latin nolo, French ignorer, Old English nat. But these are more random lexical examples, rather than survivals of a previous negative mood.)

roninbodhisattva wrote:What is the inspiration for the inherently negative verbs? Is there a natural language that inspired you in this or is just your own thing?

English has a negative auxiliary, or, to be precise, a couple of closely related negative auxiliaries don't, haven't, won't, can't, shouldn't, wouldn't.

Japanese is one language with negative verbal inflections - I'm sure there are others.

One more plural discrepancy:
Rule: -s > -sú
Example: tas > tazú

Judging by the sound samples, /a/ fronts to [A] in mnoshuac - I assume this fronting is prompted by the following /ts/?

zompist wrote:Good catches, Mornche, thanks. Those are corrected now.

And you're right about the IPA, BGMan-- I'll get that next time.

I like things like ayu → wiw myself; the fun thing is when they come neatly out of the sound changes.

roninbodhisattva wrote:What is the inspiration for the inherently negative verbs? Is there a natural language that inspired you in this or is just your own thing?

Negative moods for verbs, as in Axunašin, are common enough-- Japanese is an example. And retaining just a few remnants of an earlier inflectional category is common too (e.g. the English subjunctive showing up only in one verb; Latin having a locative for just a few words). It seemed pretty easy to put the two ideas together.

(For that matter, there are examples of inherently negative verbs-- Latin nolo, French ignorer, Old English nat. But these are more random lexical examples, rather than survivals of a previous negative mood.)

Er... which English verb were you thinking of? I assume you mean the two subjunctive forms of 'to be', but there's also subjunctive forms of 'can', 'will', and 'shall' that are fairly common. [For me at least, 'might' has lost its subjunctive meaning, except perhaps in nuance]. That's just talking about morphologically distinct forms - past, present and pluperfect subjunctives of all verbs being common in everyday speech.

I could even say: "Had I not been confused, I should not have requested that you explain; as it is, I ask that I be told which verb you have in mind!".

Salmoneus wrote:

zompist wrote: Negative moods for verbs, as in Axunašin, are common enough-- Japanese is an example. And retaining just a few remnants of an earlier inflectional category is common too (e.g. the English subjunctive showing up only in one verb;

Er... which English verb were you thinking of? I assume you mean the two subjunctive forms of 'to be', but there's also subjunctive forms of 'can', 'will', and 'shall' that are fairly common. [For me at least, 'might' has lost its subjunctive meaning, except perhaps in nuance]. That's just talking about morphologically distinct forms - past, present and pluperfect subjunctives of all verbs being common in everyday speech.

I could even say: "Had I not been confused, I should not have requested that you explain; as it is, I ask that I be told which verb you have in mind!".

What are the distinctive subjunctive forms for can, will, and shall? Distinctive in the sense of being neither the same as the relevant present or past tense form? And I'm sure zompist is not thinking of a present subjunctive like "that I be told", which you'd find only in archaising language (if you count that, you can as well count forms like "thou X(e)st" as parts of Modern English), but of the distinction "I/he/she/it was" (past) against "I/he/she/it were" (subj.), which is at least still partially upheld in contemporary literary English.

As Hans-Werner suggests, I was thinking of 'be' and its distinctive form 'I/he were'. If it weren't for this one form, English wouldn't have a distinct morphological subjunctive at all— all other cases are identical either to the past or the infinitive (and thus may well be the past and the infinitive).