Eldrin

Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Durakken
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Re: Eldrin

Post by Durakken »

I just noticed the first line of the translation...

"In the Beginning" is translated to "Emuhlu" and from what I understand it should Emuhsulu because it datative and imperfect... is that right?

Nachtuil
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Re: Eldrin

Post by Nachtuil »

I myself would expect emuh to be in the locative, so "emuhjir". "At the start".


Your word list document is helpful but you should look up how to do glossing to make it less laborious for readers to see what your doing. You can have your line of text, the floating line, and a translation.

"emhujir"
N."start".loc
'at the start"

The so called interlinear in the sentence I have shows the word is a noun, it's meaning, and the case ending. There are many ways to do interlinears and you need not be more in depth than you wish but it makes it quite a bit easier for traders to see what is going on.
.

Durakken
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Re: Eldrin

Post by Durakken »

Nachtuil wrote:I myself would expect emuh to be in the locative, so "emuhjir". "At the start".
ahh you're right that it should be.

But also, if I understand correctly;

Start/Begin = verb
+ing = imperfect tense

Then we're making it a noun so it should be "Emuhsujir" shouldn't it be?

Your word list document is helpful but you should look up how to do glossing to make it less laborious for readers to see what your doing. You can have your line of text, the floating line, and a translation.

"emhujir"
N."start".loc
'at the start"

The so called interlinear in the sentence I have shows the word is a noun, it's meaning, and the case ending. There are many ways to do interlinears and you need not be more in depth than you wish but it makes it quite a bit easier for traders to see what is going on.
.

Have any good tutorials for it? I really only translated to expand my lexicon and work out if I'm getting the grammar right. It seems it worked although it is missing all of the mood stuff so I need a text for that.
Though, if I understand what you're talking about, I was thinking of doing something like that, just not sure how to do it or what would be the point with some of it since the suffix explains itself and all the words should be usable as a Noun or Verb which makes the distinction there some what pointless... So not sure how much value it'd be.

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Also... if you've looked at the word count in the Lexicon from when I posted that originally and the number its at today, it's up to around 250ish words and I had to change one word in the translation, because the word generator I made wasn't following the rule I set down. I've improved it a bit though and I've been able to get make words quicker, though I'm not sure some of this is quite suited to purpose... That is, I'm going through really long process of doing the simpleness of making a naming language more or less. And now i've ending up with a name line "Gon Roodin Dhwaivfon" = Form of Lion Fighter" = Lion-like Fighter" which seems a bit much for a name, but oh well.

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Decided to at least give a try so I started marking it up, even though I'm pretty sure I'm doing this wrong... I spotted some errors, but I there doesn't seem to be an accepted notation for "greater plural" and I have questions about how to handle "feltel en felretke" since "feltel" would have the accusative suffix on it, but it's left off in the cluster. Do I write that still as "acc" or no? Also, from how I'm understanding cases now I think there should always be an accusative, but I realized that there isn't one if I'm using locative... or do they combine or do you mark them glossing notation?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

btw, this one can be commented on so I think you can make comments where the issue is on the document to make it easier. I'm dividing by sentence on it rather than the nonsensical verse structure in the bible. Also, various lines are highlighted to help separate what is doing what. The Eldrin is white, and the English is purplish... and definitional part is green.

Another question with this is that "nugon" means "without light" or "darkness" should I mark it as "N. light" or "N. darkness"? Right now I have it as "light" with negation which it technically is, but it is supposed to be a direct translation for "darkness" so... not sure, but in english I kept it as Darkness.

"eldra togin" is a problem too... it translates to "of the first day" but I have no idea how to mark that the "first" should be an adjective of day and make sense rather than "first of the day"

Nachtuil
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Re: Eldrin

Post by Nachtuil »

Ah ok. In English the "ing" ending does indicate a noun is in the progressive/continuous aspect, which are types of imperfective aspects but it also makes verbs nouns in what is called the "gerund" form. One can say "She likes frogs" with the same syntactic meaning as "She likes swimming". This differs from the infinitive form where one would say "She likes to swim", though really, infinitives are somewhat like nouns anyway seen in a certain light. Normally, verbs don't take case endings, god knows it might happen out there somewhere though.

That all said, yeas, if you are turning a verb into a noun, you would make it a gerund and then the case ending. You may even want them to be fused into one suffix. You can do what tickles your fancy here, you need not, I hope it is obvious, mark gerund and and progress/imperfective aspect the same way. With a case ending on the bare verb, your language speakers may implicitly understand it is a nominalised verb, that is, a gerund. I like simplicity so that is how I would approach it, though you are welcome to indulge any embellishment you see fit.

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"Lion-like fighter", it seems to work to me :D hahaha. Have you seen how long Sri Lankan names get? Perhaps you're channelling that.

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That is an admirable amount of work you've done! Your glosses are pretty much exactly what I hoped for :) I meant to write "interlinear" gloss (in fact I did) but on my phone my auto correct "fixed" it to "floating line". I don't have any good tutorials for it sadly. When I do interlinear glossing it is pretty basic and I just consult wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_g ... reviations

There are different ways to do it, and it seems to me the detail you put in varies so there is no one specific method from what I can tell. I have done it for glossing challenges on the CCB. It seems single words get periods between elements and spaces indicate separate words. Some might choose to have even more interlinears breaking words apart. It likely varies on the goals of the glossing and the nature of the language as some are easier to break into meaningful bits than others which fuse elements together.

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I assume what you mean by greater plural can just be called plural. Noun forms that indicate two of something are called "duo" and "trial" is three. It is good if you try not to define what paucal as some people seem to want to do "paucal is 4 to 8 but not 8 or more". Languages that use paucal allow some flexibility in its use depending on context.
I wouldn't bother with greater paucal (but that is because I am not sure what your intentions with it are). I would just go singular, duo, trial, paucal and plural. I actually would likely just have trial or paucal but it totally wouldn't surprise me if there is a language or two that uses both.

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"feltel en felretke"
In this example fel is indicating plurality and the ke is an accusative marker right? Oh yes, you want each noun phrase to have a suffix instead of each noun. Hmm... It wouldn't hurt to include it since it is implied I suppose. It is like a "null suffix" when you leave something unmarked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_morpheme

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I think strictly speaking, accusative case endings are used for the objects of transitive verbs so leaving a locative for locative should be fine. The following is how I would read it.

I ate bread. (transitive verb)
1st.sing.nom v."ate".pst n."bread".acc
vs.
I am home. (non-transitive verb)
1st.sing.nom v."am" n.home.loc

If you are using dative to imply direction towards and ablative to imply direction away you may also get the following situations which lack an accusative:

Let's pretend english has suffixes, dead simple: "dat" = dative "abla"= ablative "loc" =locative

I go homedat = I am going to home
I go homeabla =I am coming from home
I go homeloc = (you could decree this to be ungrammatical or you could choose to indicate that some sort of frequentive aspect, suggesting you are going around in your house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequentative )

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I think for darkness it makes sense to translate it as darkness but I would, when glossing it, indicate light and the negative prefix could act as an abessive affix (meaning lacking something). It makes sense if your language has no word for darkness and can only describe a lack of light, or even if it does, this is just a case to indicate the same thing. I am not actually sure what the best practice would be. In English we have an abessive suffix you'll no doubt recognise, "less".

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Your instinct to use genitive is good.The answer may just be to have a series of ordinal numbers or ordinal suffixes like we do in English.
You could have:
(noun being modified) number.(acting as an adjective due to an ordinal suffix) day.gen
Here the noun "x of the first day" is shown to be associated with the noun in the genitive case which is itself modified by the adjective.
(this is assuming your genitive noun follows the modified noun, you may have it come before, I have not checked I must admit)

I hope that is helpful.

Durakken
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Re: Eldrin

Post by Durakken »

Nachtuil wrote: "Lion-like fighter", it seems to work to me :D hahaha. Have you seen how long Sri Lankan names get? Perhaps you're channelling that.
All languages have these names in meaning or similar. The my issues that it seems like a fairly long name for a singular name ^.^
I assume what you mean by greater plural can just be called plural. Noun forms that indicate two of something are called "duo" and "trial" is three. It is good if you try not to define what paucal as some people seem to want to do "paucal is 4 to 8 but not 8 or more". Languages that use paucal allow some flexibility in its use depending on context.
I wouldn't bother with greater paucal (but that is because I am not sure what your intentions with it are). I would just go singular, duo, trial, paucal and plural. I actually would likely just have trial or paucal but it totally wouldn't surprise me if there is a language or two that uses both.
Greater plural is being used a lot in that because it is refering to complete group. When we're talking about birds for example, if we're talking about all birds then it's greater plural. If it is some random generic plurality then it's plural. Paucel is lesser part relative to a known group... kinda like "Those bodies" vs "the arms of those bodies". Hypothetically, any number can be used, as a prefix for number, but after trial or if they just don't care to specify they use the general plural. "Greater Plural" is just used a lot in this translation because it is discussing the creation of all things within a group so it reads a bit meh due to that but that shouldn't be a problem in general.
"feltel en felretke"
In this example fel is indicating plurality and the ke is an accusative marker right? Oh yes, you want each noun phrase to have a suffix instead of each noun. Hmm... It wouldn't hurt to include it since it is implied I suppose. It is like a "null suffix" when you leave something unmarked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_morpheme
sounds about right
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Your instinct to use genitive is good.The answer may just be to have a series of ordinal numbers or ordinal suffixes like we do in English.
You could have:
(noun being modified) number.(acting as an adjective due to an ordinal suffix) day.gen
Here the noun "x of the first day" is shown to be associated with the noun in the genitive case which is itself modified by the adjective.
(this is assuming your genitive noun follows the modified noun, you may have it come before, I have not checked I must admit)

I hope that is helpful.
"2 days of 3" would be written "Antog deltin"
"second day of 3" seems that it would be written "andra tog deltin"
"land of the 2nd day of 3" would be "tel andra telin deltin"

"-dra" is the ordinal suffix. The problem I have is that in the glossing the adjective modifies that object noun so it looks weird when in english

"land of the day" would be "tel togin"
land of the second day" would be "tel andra togin"
Direct translation of the second reads "land 2nd of the day"
I'm just having trouble listing it cuz of this pecularity.

Trying to be simple and I'm ending up with weird complications lol.
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I think I'm getting something wrong with line row 28-30 of the translation. It doesn't seem right.

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This has been helpful cuz I'm noticing and fixing errors in it still as I go.

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