Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Adjectives: Colors; Question Markers

Hi!

Today has a short update. I've decided colors will be treated as a special class of adjectives. That is to say, they don't end with "-khye" like other adjectives. Otherwise, they are utilized as any other adjective.

black --> gnau
white --> ouct
red --> kegg
blue --> wilb
green --> jirp
yellow --> yuobi
orange --> kobbi
pink --> kigi
brown --> zeds
purple --> intô

I've also added a particle marker to indicate a question. It is a prefix, attached to the verb in the sentence: zibi- .

Example:
Jonna nänasht zibizhecripa?
Jon-na nän-asht zibi-zhe-cripa?
"John-he field.DIROBJ QUES.PAST.plow?"
Did John plow the field?

Not much of an update, I know, but I haven't worked on the project lately. I'll think about it some more and make some bigger updates/revisions in the coming weeks.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Brief Update

Hi,

I know I haven't updated in a while. I made some updates in my notebook—which again I don't have handy as I post this blog—but not much else. I've been thinking more and more about how the spoken side of the language will sound.

I suppose I've kind of approached the issue back-asswards, focusing too much on written forms. Perhaps that's because I'm more comfortable with written language than with spoken. Anyway, The plus side of that has been that I have a nice long record of my thought and creation process up to this point. The downside (of course) is that it doesn't really seem like a real language yet, because so far I haven't addressed the spoken form.

The "science-y" side of linguistics has never much interested me. I've always been far more interested in grammars and vocabularies, and the unique ways in which they form and function. (To a lesser degree, this also holds true for alphabets, syllaberies, and ideogram systems.) I realize, though, that at some point I'm going to have to tackle this issue head-on.

Right now, all I have on the subject is this: vowels and consonants in written form represent a basic phoneme—there are no weird "rules" about that. In other words, the language should be very easy to "sound out" for a reader, unlike, say, English. :-)

What I'd like to do is get a digital recorder and record a sample alphabet and basic phonemes/phonics. I have an MP3 player that I know has a record mode, but I don't know if I need to get a little microphone to use it, or if one is already built-in.

Speaking of which: for the time being, I'm using the basic western (Latin) alphabet, with a few additions, if you haven't already noticed. Who knows? Maybe in a while I'll develop a syllabery to use. Yeah, syllaberies are neat. :)

Anyhow, that's all for now. Perhaps later this week I will post again with the updates I made in my working-mode notebook. I think all I added was a locative particle-marker that corresponds roughly to our English "at" (the previous two so far only denoted "close" and "far", or "here" and "there").