Another scrap of Elkar

[zompist]

Here's another bit, just because I kind of like it. This is in contrast with a typical human sentence like "Put this in the other one over there." An elcar would prefer to say:

Chun t?lpiph q?l-tulpiphoj tuly-qdunk rapat.
put (sphere-hollow-half) in-(sphere-hollow-large-half-other) (on-far-right)-(second-tray-big-thick) request-A
A requests you to put this medium-sized bowl inside the other larger one you'll find on the far right of the second shelf.

This illustrates what I call object anaphora, which you can think of either as abstract nouns or as rather concrete pronouns. Tulpiphoj, for instance, is based on t?p 'ball-shaped object'. The vowel change makes it a big ball; the -l- makes it a hollow ball; the -iph cuts it in half-- thus, a bowl; -oj means that this is the second ball-shaped object we're referring to in this sentence.

D?k is a flat tray-shaped object; d?nk is a thick one-- thus, a shelf; dunk is a big shelf; qdunk is the second shelf.

Elkar?l is concise, at least if you talk about the sort of things that are important to elcari.

[Ran]

Another sentence that seems to defy every single Terran convention!

Nice work!

p.s. there's a glitch. The author of this thread is displayed as "Bob", not "zompist".

[zompist]

Another sentence that seems to defy every single Terran convention!

Nice work!

Heh, thanks.

p.s. there's a glitch. The author of this thread is displayed as "Bob", not "zompist".

Not a glitch. Bob tried to worm his way in here, but I sent him packing.

[Iscun]

Very nice. Though, that's near impossible for me to pronounce!

So does Elkarin's object anaphora completely replace nouns, or are there some actual concrete nouns in this language?

[Ran]

So how do you pronounce the sentence?

[zompist]

So how do you pronounce the sentence?

Just like it looks. The vowels are pretty much as in Barakhinei (except that none of them are rounded). Ch and j are as in English; ph is just [f]; q is the same uvular q as in Arabic or Verdurian. This sentence doesn't happen to have any implosives in it.

And Iscun, there are 'regular' nouns in Elkar?l. I haven't yet thought of a way to get around those.

[So Haleza Grise]

What about the /y/ though? is that a front rounded vowel? (probably not, given as you say that all vowels are unrounded)

Elkaril seems to favour high vowels . . . but that could just be the effect of the small samples we've had so far.

--Rhisto Filipei

[zompist]

What about the /y/ though? is that a front rounded vowel? (probably not, given as you say that all vowels are unrounded)

Ah, sorry, forgot to explicate that one. The phoneme there is /ly/,
actually-- a palatalized l, as in 'million'.

(I could use a single transcription scheme for all Almean languages; but I like to fine-tune a transcription for each language, and the differences allude to the underlying different alphabets anyway. But it can be misleading sometimes.)

The entire vowel system:
i ? u (high)
e o (high mid)
? ? (low mid)
? a (low)