zompist bboard

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:

Elcar wrote: 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.

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".

ranskaldan wrote:Another sentence that seems to defy every single Terran convention!

Nice work!

Heh, thanks.

ranskaldan wrote: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.

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?

So how do you pronounce the sentence?

ranskaldan wrote: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.

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

So Haleza Grise wrote: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)