House of Sanchez

Is That All There Is?

2011-01-12T22:31:00.004-07:00

My life is very good. I am happier, on the whole, than I've been in a long time. Longer than I can remember -- maybe ever.

Yet deeper inside, there is a certain darkness. It is metaphorical and metaphysical. It's less a feeling than a sense: a sense, perhaps, of meaninglessness. Perhaps of emptiness. If you prefer large words, perhaps of The Numinous in an ontologically apophatic way.

I think this may perhaps be what Thomas Merton conceived of as "le point vierge". As for me, I call it the darkness. The part of yourself that even you don't know; though you may be aware of it precisely because of its apparent "absence."

The best comprehensions or descriptions of it come not from theology or philosophy, but often from popular song.

interior sanctuary

2010-10-09T23:01:00.004-06:00

I have an interior sanctuary. An imaginary land, deep northern forest, always winter. At night I see lights flickering across the lake where my cabin sits, about 100 yards away. I don't know where they come from, or why. They weave drunkenly in the night; by day, they're gone.

Or else, it's some chilly place, always gray and raining. Maybe the pacific northwest. The relentless downpour makes a thundering, echoing noise as it beats the roof. The building is now large and cavernous, perhaps some kind of equipment shed.

Wherever it is, a few things are always the same. There is a fireplace nearby. There is no electricity. And I am alone. It gets dark early. I spend a lot of time with a book and a kerosene lamp. I often hear dogs or coyotes or wolves, howling in the distance. I never see them.

I rarely dream. The nights when I do, my dreams take on shades of yellow and gray. I re-live memories. Old cities, long since changed, take on the configurations they had when I knew them. People I've forgotten -- thought I'd forgotten -- populate the cityscapes. Sunsets bleed red across the sky, behind the rooftops. Red turns to black, as the sun sets and the moon rises. I feel the touch of a small, warm hand in mine, hear laughter. See a smile, bright shining eyes. Taste her lips... The dreams never last long. Never seem to reach their consummation.

But it is okay. I have my cabin in the woods, my place out of the rain, the warmth of my fire, my solitude.

If I ever seem not to be present, seem to be somewhere else, I am. There is an interior sanctuary, where I can always be alone.

Reflections: The City at Night

2010-09-18T21:29:00.003-06:00

Editorial note: This is more "stream-of-consciousness" than my usual manner of writing. It is definitely not intended to argue a point, and decidedly un-systematic in character. I'm more interested in feedback about its artistic merit than its application of logic or reasoning.

Lights, hazy, materializing slowly in mist and fog. They seem to signify wandering souls. Dante and Virgil, or St. John of the Cross, all journeying through private immaterial realms. They seem as interlopers, spiritual intruders in the profane earth. Here red, here green, here purple, here blue: they come and go.

Noise rises from the street. Words, English, give texture to the heretofore intangible dark. Clanging, brutal, short: words like blades upon armor. A barbarian tongue. Lovely, still, in spite of its brutality. Songs of love, sex, violence, death -- the whole scope of human existence has been told in its stark tones. The voices die down, die out, their people moving on in the night to other unseen doors.

It's getting colder. And colder weather reminds me of you.

Headlights, an errant car lost on a residential street. They cut sharply through the haze, jerking their little piece of the night sharply into focus. The headlights seem to draw memories in crude sketches, as they careen and veer and disappear.

In the dark once more, the sketches grow soft, grow round. They take flesh, take color, take form in my mind. Though the air is colder, the memories grow warmer. The red-green-purple-blue spirits take no notice as another shade joins them: yellow. Cream. Sunlight on snow.

Like snow, the memory melts away, and the blackness of night returns. New voices clang; the night is again shade, haze, and mist.

Some somethings I never told you

2010-08-27T23:32:00.003-06:00

Thoughts of you keep me up at night.

When times were tough -- really, really tough -- the only thing which kept me from sliding into oblivion was the hope that I might see you, touch you, once more.

It's painful to be alone.

I try not to live in the past, but memories often color my perception of the present.

You were most beautiful in the morning, without makeup, in pale yellow sunlight.

I measure all my creative musical and artist efforts against yours.

A City Without Streets

2010-08-15T22:05:00.004-06:00

I want to share something important to me.

It's a story about an experience I had years ago, simple and powerful, one that would influence my thoughts about the world in profound and subtle ways (though I didn't know it at the time). Strangely, the particulars of the experience -- the exact time or date, other minute details -- have faded since it happened. But the sensations I felt -- the ideas it sparked in me -- remain vibrantly clear. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it is easy to see now how a seed was planted within me by this experience, one that has only recently started to grow to bloom as I nourished it with greater learning. After I tell this story, maybe the reason I think about cities so much will be more clear, too.

I was a college student at the University of Iowa, living in Iowa City. It was late summer, I think between my second and third years of college. On this particular day, there had been a large race of some type. Half-marathon, 10K, I don't remember for sure now. What is important is that many streets in the city around where I lived were closed off. Some of them were part of the race-route, but it seems to me that other ones were closed for spectators, or maybe some sort of street carnival.

The race itself had been held in the late morning and gotten over some time around noon. It was now later in the afternoon. I was going somewhere (I don't recall where) with a few friends.

So... we're walking along, and I noticed something odd. It took me a few minutes, but I was able to pinpoint it: there were no cars. None. The cars one might have expected were nowhere in sight, because the streets were still closed off from the race earlier in the day. There weren't even parked cars along the street. (Looking back now, I remember other times streets were closed for large events, and I believe the IC police towed cars that weren't moved from the streets to be closed.)

The next part is hard to articulate... except to say that I felt an unusual, beautiful, sense of freedom. Not just because I could walk down the middle of the street with no traffic to worry about, although maybe that's part of it. It was more like a sense of "doing something right," being "all natural," choose whatever hippie euphemism you like. It just seemed very, very COOL.

I had a vision that day. Maybe it is crazy, but it is special to me: I decided that one day, I wanted to build a new city. One without traffic. In my mind, I called it "A City Without Streets" although that name is inaccurate. There were streets, but they had no motor vehicles. They were, rather, paths for pedestrians on foot or on manual-powered devices: bicycles, rollerskates, even skateboards.

Although it was crude at the time, I started to try and imagine how to plan such a city. How would it be laid out? What would it look like? How would public services, particularly emergency services, be handled?

Sadly, I never pursued the idea much more deeply than this at the time, and never committed my ideas to paper, though I think I shared it with a few friends around the Wesley Foundation. The reasons are myriad, but not the least of them were my relative immaturity and my relative busyness. I was young and in college, preoccupied with my own chosen course of study (English Lit.) and my extracurriculars: the Wesley Foundation, getting laid, drinking.

But like I said, the seed was planted. I almost forgot it was there, until I happened to pick up a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. That book was like the first spring rain; it lead to other texts in the same field. In particular, James Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere, with its expansive historical view of the effect of the automobile on the American economy and American communities in the 20th century, lead to great blooming of that little seed.

So if you've been reading my blog at all over the pst few months (all two of you!), this event is a big part of the reason I have such an abiding interest in cities, design, and the urban landscape. The external event was simple and almost unremarkable; the interior changes wrought by its sparks have been wonderful and almost mystical.

The Nigerian Scam Lives

2010-07-27T00:07:00.001-06:00

So, this text is taken verbatim from an email I recently received. (Which was filtered as SPAM, of course.) It's part of what's come to be known as "The Nigerian Scam", apparently because many such scams like this originate in that country. Something to do with rather vague laws and lax, easily-bribed law enforcement.

Anyway, I find it fun sometimes to read an email such as this and have a good laugh. I particularly enjoy the kooky English names, the slightly incoherent grammatical constructions, and the misspellings. (This one, for example, frequently has "is" in place of "his.")

GREETINGS!!!

Compliments of the day!

I and my younger sister write to seek for your assistance; we got your contact

from a noble gentleman that came to our refugee camp who came to give a seminar

about AIDS whom we confronted that we are looking for a God-fearing person that

is when your data was given to us.

I want to introduce myself to you. My name is Gift Zaki and my younger sister

Sarah Zaki a Liberian, my consignment contains More than 18 million United

States dollars and some quantity of gold and Diamond, which I cannot be specify.

The consignments are presently in the State.. The consignment gets to the State

through the help of a Governmental U.N diplomat Dr.DAVID LEE. The fact is that

(DIP) Dr.DAVID LEE is supposed to have delivered this consignment to a man

called Mr. Womack Hardee in the State.

The week (DIP)Dr.DAVID LEE is suppose to deliver the consignment to him, when he

got to the State after clearing the consignment from the Airport, he call Mr.

Womack Hardee to tell him the description to is house for the delivery, but is

wife answered the call and told (DIP) Dr.DAVID LEE that her husband Mr.Womack

Hardee hard a fatal car accident which lead to his death some few hours.

Mr.Womack Hardee has already paid the demurrages from the security company,

he paid for Bullion van that took the consignment to the airport and he paid for

custom check report he also assisted us in getting the Necessary Document

covering the Consignment and Also for the DRUG / ANTI TERRORIST CERTIFICATE,

which is so expensive that he spent 25 thousand dollars to acquire it, but

unfortunately he died in a car accident, that was why (DIP) Dr.DAVID LEE has to

deposit the consignment with a warehouse over there in State and called us to

informed us about what is happening.

Please I and my little sister seek for your help to Contact the Diplomat so that

he can be able to deliver the Consignment to you. I do want you to instruct him

that you have discuses this with us, and you want him to the delivery of your

children consignment to you on time now.you can contact (DIP)Dr.DAVID LEE on

this email address(drdavidlee01@yahoo.com.hk ) and here is also his phone

number, ( 903-375-3093 )

Please, Contact (DIP) Dr.DAVID LEE on time and update me through mail. I await

your urgent response.

Thanks and God bless you

Gift/Sarah Zaki

Passing Thoughts on Eliot - the Unreal Cities

2010-07-06T21:36:00.005-06:00

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

~T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

I'll probably be accused of being too much of a literalist, but here goes anyway.

I think Eliot's assessment of the "unreal" cities is wrong. Or, at least, only half right.

The unreality he describes is perhaps best understood not as a quality of the cities themselves, but as indicative of one man's perception of them and relationship to them. In other words, the description of such cities as unreal reflects a desensitized form of detachment; what we see when reading the poem is the speaker's own delusional sense of his place in the world. Calling these cities "unreal" is a type of cultural hundred-yard-stare.

The speaker is shell-shocked -- and never sets foot in a trench.

So, how did he get that way? And why did (and DOES) the image resonate so strongly with so many people?

It would be easy at this point to impute to the poem some of the disarray of Eliot's own personal life in the period during which The Waste Land was composed. In fact, it is quite tempting. (See, for example, "Preludes", one of my personal favorites, as well as "Rhapsody on a Windy Night.")

But I'm digressing. I wanted to talk about cities. The cities are real -- as real as your body, as real as the mind that thinks deep, profound, privileged, fashionably nihilistic, avant-garde thoughts. (Eliot and I are much alike: we've both been well-cared-for.)

And the cities have a feel -- not just the spatial, or the locative, but the rhythmic and organic. Something like a kaleidoscope: a set of constants, which refract into 1,000,000 different patterns. A Greek Chorus of individual lives, moving like blood through the veins. Ballet? Modern Dance? Too-apt metaphors. Alive, and you're a part of it.

I don't know that any of this has a thing to do with Eliot. Except maybe to tell him "lighten up on London!" I've never been. But I'd like to go see it.

Land of the (un)Free

2010-04-06T21:51:00.005-06:00

I want to post some thoughts on the recent events surrounding Constance McMillen, the lesbian teen whose high school canceled the prom when she asked to bring her girlfriend as her date and to wear a tuxedo. I won't re-hash the story; anyone competent using Google or another search engine should be able to find out the details of the story for themselves.

The only contribution I have to add to the whole business is this: McMillen's case, and others like it where questions of the basic Constitutional guarantees of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are at stake, expose the hypocrisy and idiocy of American society at its basest level.

How can we, as a society, claim to believe in the rights of the individual, when we won't let two girls go together to a school dance? What are we "protecting" there? Nothing. What are we violating? Supposedly "unalienable rights" -- those of a person to live her life, enjoy her liberty, and pursue happiness in the way she found most fitting.

How can we claim to be the "land of the free" and then tell some people that they're less free than others?

How can we call ourselves the "home of the brave" when, in reality, we're cowards -- racist, sexist, religionist, homophobic, bigoted cowards?

My only hope, I suppose, is this: that McMillen's case, and others like it, will continue to expose the hypocrisy and idiocy of American society at its basest level. Only by first acknowledging the problems will be able to begin to redress them.

An Unquiet City

2010-03-24T23:19:00.011-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about cities lately. What they mean, what they represent symbolically, how they function, what they are in reality. Mostly due, I suppose, to reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. I'll try not to rave too much about it, but it really is an interesting book, even for a layman with no formal training in architecture or urban planning. Jacobs, from everything I've read about her, was something of an amateur and an "outsider" when it came to urban planning, but loved her New York City neighborhood, and her book grew largely out of empirical observations made there and in other cities about "what works" (my phrase) when it comes to revitalizing cities. Apparently, she also carried on a rather bitter academic/professional feud with Lewis Mumford, an urban planner whose ideas she attacked in the introduction of her book. But by all accounts, both Jacobs and Mumford loved cities, and what cities stood for, and what they could be.

But really, what I want to focus on is the juxtaposition (in my own mind) of Jacobs's ideas with some of those of Thomas Merton. The connection appears tenuous, at first, so let me give some background to show where I'm coming from with this.

Throughout much of my life, I've straddled the line between being a city dweller and a small town (or country) dweller. Growing up, we lived in a secluded rural place, but the mall was less than 5 minutes away. Then, during college and ever since, I've lived basically a city life-- perhaps not as urban as NYC or Boston or Chicago, but Denver and Omaha are cities nonetheless. (Iowa City, as a distinctively college town, falls somewhat outside the conventional definition of "urban", but surely still counts as city living.)

Anyways, Merton also wrote a bit about cities, albeit from a theological perspective. Thus abstract and often symbolic, but the problems he thought about had concrete consequences. As a Catholic monk, he was typically concerned with social justice issues that pertained to urban life. Or maybe, with how urban life was brought to bear on, and directly affected, the spiritual lives of people. For Merton, as far as I can tell from his writings, "the city" is often synonymous with the forces of crass consumerism and capitalism and sheer greed, wherein human lives are a commodity for sale, and humans are consumers who exist so that companies (and a few plutocrats) can get wealthier. So it almost goes without saying that Merton's opinions of city life were quite low, and he often contrasted city living with the "simplicity" of rural monastic life.

For a long time I found I rather agreed with Merton, and railed (usually in privacy of my own thoughts) against The City. The abject misery, poverty, suffering, crowding, congestion, construction, traffic; the oversaturation by the media, the advertising every place imaginable, the concrete with no green space.

Then, I started reading Jacobs's book.

I hope I don't give the impression of being a leaf blown a new direction by every breeze that stirs it, but her book has caused me to re-evaluate my attitudes. For one thing, I had to take into account the real fact that I am a city person, and have been for a while now. And taking that into account, I had to consider if my own life was truly as dire and bad as Merton would have me paint it. The answer, of course, is "no." I asked myself: is city living, in and of itself, necessarily "bad"? Is it necessarily detrimental to human well being to live in an urban place? Once again, the conclusion I drew was "no."

I still find myself agreeing with Merton in a lot of ways, primarily in that I too feel we'd be better of in a less consumeristic, less greedy, less mindlessly conformist, society. But I no longer feel that those problems are necessarily tied to urbanity, though you might argue that urban living sometimes facilitates them. And hell, let me be frank: I enjoy city life. I do like plenty of peace and quiet, but I think I'd go stir-crazy if I was forced to live a rural life. I'd miss the restaurants, the variety of people, the "high culture" things like museums, galleries, concerts, Shakespeare On The Green, and the like.

My closing thoughts draw me back to a church bulletin from a couple of years ago, which sadly I no longer possess (though my memory of it is still vivid). The church's pastor would write a weekly "column" that was printed on the back of the bulletin, wherein he'd muse about some pertinent Bible verse or timely topic. The one I am recalling was a reflection on a verse from the Revelation. I can't now recall the specific chapter and verse, but it was near the end of the Revelation, where John describes visiting the City of God. The reflection involved some light exegesis around this fact -- that God's Kingdom, for Christians, is a city. It's active, bustling, full of varied different persons doing varied different things. The city itself was like a living thing. It may be crowded, and some people may be strangers. But still, it would be a holy place.

I wish now that Father Merton could've read that reflection.

A Creation Story

2009-10-13T09:36:00.002-06:00

I haven't worked on my conlang project for a while... online, that is. Internally, the gears are still turnin' and the malt is still churnin'.

I've decided to do what so many other famousy-type artificial language constructors have done: invent a fictional setting wherein the language is used, and then write a creation myth (or other religious literature).

My process is simple: 1) Imagine the fictional setting (done). 2) Write the creation myth, in English (done). 3) Translate into Dradrikkan (started, not yet completed).

I find that working in this manner is productive in at least two major ways. First, it forces an expansion of the lexicon, as I decide on ("invent") new words to translate English words. Second, It forces an examination of the existing grammatical structures, and helps me tweak them where needed, or create ("invent") new structures that I haven't yet thought of/about. For example, I've had to create new locative particle-markers for concepts like "above", "below", and "into." I've also had to think about how compound sentences (and fragmentary sentences) in English would be expressed in Dradrikkan.

I don't want to post anything quite yet, though, on the actual work. The creation myth is very short—less than a notebook page, handwritten—and so I will wait until I have the whole thing translated before I post, so I can include morpheme-by-morpheme transliterations. Stay tuned.

Random Aside

2009-10-13T09:35:00.001-06:00

Mike is PO'd at himself, because he went to the library to use the computer and forgot to bring his flash drive... now he has no way to save poems, conlang shit, etc., even if he were to bother typing it up... dammit!

Random Diatribe

2009-07-07T13:43:00.002-06:00

Today, I'm going to deviate from the established purpose of this blog in order to vent about something that has been irritating the hell out of me for the past year or so.

That subject is the use of an old verb in a new, creative way, unrelated to its original meaning. In this particular instance, the verb in question is smash.

The old use was pretty well understood by all modern English-speakers. Without recourse to a dictionary, I would define it this way: "smash. v. To break or destroy an object made of a fragile material, such as glass, pottery, etc." Shatter would be a close synonym.

The new usage which bothers me so runs something like this: "smash. v. To eat a meal quickly and entirely, in a gluttonous manner." Devour is the closest existing "proper" synonym (in my house growing up, the word wolf was used as a verb to mean this).

For example, the sentence "Bobby smashed that plate of scrambled eggs!" woud mean two entirely different things to, say, my grandmother and my 20-something roommate. To grandma, it denotes that Bobby dropped the plate of eggs, or perhaps threw it against the wall in a fit of rage. To the Roommie, it means that Bobby was hungry and ate all, and I mean all, the eggs.

I understand that language will change, and probably it's pointless for me to whine about a perfectly natural phenomenon such as this. Still, it bugs the hell out of me.

There, I'm done venting for now. More will be updated on the conglang project, if I ever stop being lazy and get around to working on it some more.

Adjectives: Colors; Question Markers

2009-06-16T11:22:00.003-06:00

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.

Brief Update

2009-06-02T10:06:00.003-06:00

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").

Vocabulary: Adjectives & Adverbs

2009-05-19T10:57:00.007-06:00

III. Adjective rules

Adjectives are attached to the nouns/pronouns they modify. (Don't ask me about noun-phrases just yet...)

All adjectives conveniently end in -fai. Note that -fai is NOT a particle marker in the sense that I've defined a "particle marker" so far; rather, it's just a unique characteristic of adjectives that they all end with this sound.

-fai CAN be used *like* a particle marker, however, to turn nouns (or pronouns, or even verbs and adverbs) into adjectives. Adding that ending is quite like adding -ish or -ful or -ly to a noun in English to transform it into an adjective.

IV. Adverb rules

Adverbs attach to the verb being modified. They also have a unqiue ending, -kyþ. Adjectives etc. can be made into adverbs by adding -kyþ like a particle marker, following the same rules outline above for adjectives.

It's important to note here, though, that many "common" adjectives are NOT made into adverbs in this fashion. Words like quickly, slowly, etc. have their own distinct forms (see the example vocabulary below). However, this system exists to allow the language to expand, stretch, and grow. Put in nerd terms, this simple feature (adding a non-particle-marker as an ending) enhances the productivity of the language.

Here are some basic practice words:
Adjectives:
quick/fast --> aurfai
slow --> luiffai
good --> vleufai
bad --> fedoufai
straight --> wisufai
crooked -->juiðofai
careful/cautious --> tyreifai

Adverbs:
quickly --> aurukyþ*
slowly --> lofkyþ*
good/well --> vloukyþ*
badly/poorly --> fedokyþ*
straightly --> wisufaikyþ
crookedly --> juðofaikyþ
carefully/cautiously --> tyreifaikyþ

* Denotes "irregular" adverbs; that is, adverbs not formed by adding -kyþ to existing adjectives; that is, adverbs with their own unique and distinct forms.

As always, some sample sentences to play with:

Mehrila zhehanach-aurukyþ gebtiashter Joneði.
Mehri-la zhe-hanach-aurukyþ gebti-ashter John-eði.
"Mary-she RECENT.PAST.cook-quickly vegetable.OBJ.PL John.INDIR."
Mary quickly cooked vegetables for John.

Kenan shraenirier treþekt-tyreifaikyþ eddeashter-juiðofai.
Kenan shra-en-irier tre-þekt-tyreifai-kyþ edde-ashter-juiðofai.
"ThePL Dog.SUB-PL.LOC-DIST DIST.FUTURE.eat-careful.ADVB cat.OBJ.PL-crooked."
Those dogs there will carefully eat crooked cats. (Or, Those there dogs will eat crooked cats with caution.)

Note in the above sentence that the so-called "distant future" tense of the verb can also be used when making "generalizations" about a subject's behavior. Also, remember there is no neuter pronoun in Draddrikan, so the subject shra simple goes without. However, there is a definite article in Draddrikan, so this sentence clearly identifies some particular dogs who will eat cats—dogs that are further marked by a locative particle roughly corresponding to English "there"—which dogs would be determined by context.

Continued Grammatical Expansion

2009-05-19T10:41:00.004-06:00

Hi,

Okay, so I've continued to expand the grammatical elements of this language. Mainly, I keep adding particle markers. The newest ones are these.

Basic location marker (singular/plural):
"at" --> -emdi/-emdier

invitational verb marker:
"let's" --> -udi

Here are a couple more example sentences to show how they might work, using vocab and grammar that can be found in previous posts. These sentences are transcribed thus:

Straight Draddrikan
Draddrikan, broken into morphemes
"Literal English" (i.e. "word-for-word")
Smooth English

Nen breavreðudi crikemdi.
Nen bre-avreð-udi crik-emdi.
"We-two will.sleep.let's bed.at."
Let's go to bed.

Datepasht hanacharadaa taeði.
Datep-asht hanach-aradaa ta-eði.
"Meat.dir cook.imp I.indir."
Cook me meat. (Or, Cook meat for me.)

Sentences are becoming somewhat more complex, but not huge yet. Obviously, the language is impoverished currently by the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Those will be the next undertaking, in a near future post.

Grammatical words: short update

2009-05-12T11:57:00.003-06:00

I've added some grammar pieces to what's already been laid out. Continuing to improve meaning and elegance of structure. :)

Definite Article
Only one definite article with a sing. and plural form. Would variously mean "the, this, that, those, these," etc., depending on context.

kena/kenan

Conjunctions
Only two, so far. Perhaps more as needed.

and --> vanna
with --> ghinna

Particle Marker
One new one to add to the list, for the indirect object.

-eði/-eðier

Let's try another sentence, using some of the vocabulary from my last post, to illustrate.

John put on pants and a shirt.
Jonna clepfashter vanna fletashter zheplerm naeði.
"Jon-he pants and shirt dressed him[self]."

Notice the following points: since pants and shirt are both objects of the verb, they both get the appropriate plural marker. Also, Draddrikan only has the verb "[to] dress", which corresponds rougly to English's "put on." Moreover, the verb is not reflexive in the way English is; the pronoun "he" appears both as the subject and again later as the indirect object of the verb, and in its second appearance receives the appropriate particle marker.

Now where getting somewhere! Having fun!

A Vocabulary!

2009-05-12T10:51:00.007-06:00

Here, just for fun and to tide you (or myself?) over for a couple days, is a short vocabulary I've put together of some common nouns. Obviously this is nowhere near a complete list; these are just a handful of words I invented :) so I can start the business of refining grammar. If grammar is a mortal that holds the structure together, the vocabulary is the bricks of that structure. And if the mortal needs experimented upon, I need bricks to use in the meantime.

Vocabulary pt. 1: Nouns
English --> Draddrikan

dog --> shra
cat --> edde
field --> nän
street --> lurl
man --> tok
boy --> tukka (also "child")
woman --> atok
girl --> etl
house --> ker
car --> mör
table --> liria
chair --> dru
meat --> datep
vegetable --> gebti (in general, not a specific vegetable)
bed --> crik
floor --> jeltad
shirt --> flet
pants --> clepf
(a) drink --> wug
food --> yusht
bird --> metch
city --> stom
(a) dress --> shen
clock --> kardy
lamp --> fahn
window --> artwe

Obviously, these are all tangible objects, mostly things you'll encounter around the house. I haven't started on abstract nouns ("time," "justice," etc.) yet. Also, note these are all singular forms.

Vocabulary pt. 2: Verbs
English infinitive, sans "to" --> Draddrikan verb stem
plow --> cripa
work --> dra
eat --> þekt
drink --> mæna
dress --> plerm (in these sense of "put clothing on")
sing --> lammer
laugh --> bremi
sleep --> avreð
run --> drad
walk --> orble
cook --> hanach
write --> emret
read --> limmer
dance --> lug
talk --> bagha

Again, a very short list, comprised of some very common daily activities. Adequate to work with, though, for grammar-tweaking purposes.

Interior Dissonance

2009-05-12T10:39:00.006-06:00

Well, I keep running into a sort of mental block as I go about the construction of this fantasy language.

As I review some of the sample sentences I posted in my last blog, I hear two conflicting voices in my head. One says something like, "you can just drop an bunch of nouns together in any old order you want! That makes no sense!" The other voice replies, "Why couldn't you? Assuming that, in fact, they're not in 'any old order' but rather their order—along with particle markers—lends meaning to the sentence?"

In short, my own predilection to "think" in terms of grammar that I already know (to wit: English grammar) is playing some games with my mind. Especially when I try to conceive how a more complex sentence would translate in Draddrikan. Take, for example, something like this:

John, the short-tempered, stout-hearted blacksmith, left his usual occupation of ironworking in order to plow Mary the schoolteacher's field—the one where she grows cucumbers and okra, the primary vegetables used when making her famous pickles, which are quickly becoming well-loved in these parts, having won the blue ribbon at last year's county fair pickle-contest.

Obviously, that is a cumbersome monster of a sentence—albeit perfectly "legal" and more-or-less intelligible. Certainly, though, it could be broken down into smaller pieces. But then, wouldn't it lose some of its punch and zazz?

But that's getting off topic. The main point would be, how to keep track of all the particle markers that might be necessary in a sentence like this to relate subjects and objects (direct and indirect), as well as the adjectives and adverbs along with the nouns or pronouns or verbs they modify?

Problems to be worked out. Luckily, there's no ETA on this project; I'll play around for a while in my hand notebook (it's easier to think these things through when I can scribble and cross out) and see what comes.

Grammar, a revision

2009-05-08T12:14:00.004-06:00

Hi!

Here is a brief revision to some of the grammar rules I laid out in my last post, as well as some expansion on the grammatical rules.

First: I think I'll can the whole "case-endings" idea. as various linguists, teachers, etc., have pointed out, the idea of "cases" is taken from Latin. Which doesn't make them bad (not by a long shot), but it's ridiculous and silly (and occasionally pointless and futile) to try and force a non-Latin language—with its own internal logic and grammar—into Latin semantic categories.

So why not let a language organize itself, around its own semantic categories and epsitemological distinctions? (This is what is known, in the social sciences, as the "Right to Self-Determination".)

Rather than try to use the old case system, I'll be introducing a system of affixes (mostly suffixes) that I prefer to call "particle markers". Some of them may overlap with Latin's case system, some of them won't. These particles will denote not only "case" but other relationship between words in a sentence as well.

That having been said, I've got my notebook handy today, so I will record a bunch of pronouns I've come up with, along with a couple of particle markers I have for verb tenses, and also some particle markers for nouns. I only wish there was a way to lay this out on a chart—I find a chart so much easier to comprehend, compared to long lists.

Pronouns:
English --> masculine/feminine

I --> ta/ta
you singular --> net/let
you plural ("y'all") --> netan/letan
we two --> nen/len
we all --> nenan/lenan
he --> na/(blank)
she --> (blank)/la
[no neuter "it"]
they --> nana/lala

NOTE: There is no neuter pronoun; unsexed objects use masculine he or they form. When using a plural form in which males and females are both present, the masculine form is used—just like Spanish. :)

Verb tenses: particle markers

distant past --> je-
near past --> zhe-
[no present affix]
near future --> bre-
distant future --> tre-
progressive ("ing") --> -ars
perfect --> -ara
imperative ("must") --> -aradaa

NOTE: The last three are called participles, in English. In Draddrikan, you can create any tense/form by adding the appropriate affix to the verb stem.

Nouns: particle markers
what is marked --> singular/plural

subject --> (blank)/-en
object --> -asht/-ashter
possesive --> -da/-daater
close proximity location --> -ent/-ender
dist. prox. location --> -iri/-irier
close temporal location --> -elta/-elder
dist. temporal location --> -ænt/-ænder

NOTE: Obviously, this is a far-from-complete list of possible (and plausible!) particle markers. This is just a quickie, so to speak, to lay out the most basic framework required for constructing basic sentences.

SENTENCES:

Fun! Let's try out a few basic sentences. Please note that basic sentence form is Subject-Object-Verb in Draddrikan. Let's take an example using the following words:

[to] plow --> cripa (stem form)
field --> nän
John --> Jon
Mary --> Merhi
week --> riuk

He plowed the field. (recently)
Na nänasht zhecripa.

John plowed the field. (a while ago)
Jonna nänasht jecripa.

NOTE: Even though a "proper" subject is used, the he pronoun is attached to John's name to help clarify.

John is plowing Mary's field.
Jonna nänasht-Merhida cripaars.

Here, note that the possesor noun is attached, like a suffix, to the object noun—that is, the noun being possessed. The verb, too, receives a participle marking, indicating (what we call in English) the "present progressive" form of the verb.

John will have plowed Mary's field next week.
Jonna nänasht-Mehrida trecripaara riukænt.
"John field-Mary's will-have-plow-ed week-(distant)."

Here, week receives a temporal marker, since it indicates the time when the action will happen. Notice, too, the verb stem cripa receives both a future-tense prefix AND a participle suffix. Finally, this is not an "exact" translation of the English; as the language currently exists, there is no particle marker that corresponds directly to our word next. To a native speaker, it would simply be assumed that the action being described will happen some time off; the hearer of the above sentence would know from cultural norms and the context of the conversation that "next week" was simply implied.

I should probably mention that I really like archaic letters, like æ, Þ/þ, and Ð/ð, that you find in Old and Middle English texts. So I will be re-introducing them into Draddrikan. Why? Because I can.

That's all for now. More in a few days.

Grammar: Rough Sketch (I)

2009-05-05T11:38:00.007-06:00

Here is a rudimentary (VERY rudimentary) introduction to my new language, tenatively called "Draddrikan", and its grammar. Sadly, I don't have handy my notebook in which I laid out some of the details, such as the actual prefixes and suffixes for verbs and nouns, so those will have to wait for a later post. :(

So... Ideas behind this language: to make a mild-to-moderately agglutinative language. Verbs in particular agglutinate; however, like English, they have a simplistic conjugational system which relies on nouns and/or pronouns to indicate subject. Nouns agglutinate with case endings based, loosely, on OE case system (locative cases are my own invention). Endings also can be used to transform various words from one part of speech into another (such as a noun into an adjective, verb into an adverb, etc.)

Part I: Grammar

A. Verbs. Prefixes and suffixes attached to verb stems indicate tense and form. There are not different conjugations based on verbs' subject(s); as a result, nouns of pronouns “must” (Ha Ha!) be used for comprehensibility. There are five "tenses" in this language: distant past, recent past, present, near future, and distance future. For fantasy purposes, I may even introduce two more tenses, cosmological/mythical in use: "once upon a time" past, and "happily ever after" future. Common forms exist: simple, progressive, perfect, as well as imperative, interrogative, and probably some others I still need to add. Note: simple present tense has NO prefixes or suffixes. The infinitive/stem form is the same for present simple, much like Japanese.

B. Nouns. Nouns have a basic case system with six forms (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and two different locative for "near" and "distant"); cases are all suffixes. Absent gender system for nouns: all proper nouns are “neuter” in that case endings, etc. don’t change. (Put another way: no yucky declensions.) Verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be made nouns by attachment of a special nominalizer suffix. NOTE: nominative case, like simple present verb tense, has no suffix—just the noun in its purest form.

C. Articles. Only one definite article, no indefinite article. This article would thus variously be translated as "the," "this," "that," depending on context. It also has a plural form.

D. Pronouns. Pronouns have singular and plural forms, as well as masculine and feminine. No neuter pronoun ("it"), however. There are two first-person plural forms: one indicating just two people ("me and you") as well as many people ("we all"). Second person also has singular and plural forms.

E. Prepositions. Few (none?) prepositions, as some of their functions are fulfilled by case endings.

F & G. Adjective and Adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs rules were laid out in rough form, but as I mentioned above, I don't have that notebook handy as I write this.

H. Conjugations. Haven't been addressed yet.

Part II: Vocabulary. Not there quite yet.

Obviously, a lot of work needs to be done. This is still very much a rough draft; "proto-Draddrikan" if you like. I am sure I've left a lot out grammatically; I haven't even begun to consider phonology, and have really only scratched the surface when it comes to morphology. I have started a haphazard lexicon, though; maybe I'll include that in a near-future post.

Comments are welcome! I appreciate feedback.

H.o.S. Revived!

2009-05-05T11:20:00.003-06:00

Hi all!

The House of Sanchez is back online!

After a three-year hiatus, I'm back to start posting again, unleashing my thoughts on a largely uninterested Internetal hoi poloi.

Specifically, I want to change the focus of this blog towards my Constructed Language ("conglang") project. For those who don't know, I've always been interested in languages, and recently I've started taking a few shorts steps towards constructing my own fantasy lanaguage.

Why do it?

Well, why not? There are many reasons for constructing an artificial language. Many have tried to create "user-friendly" artificial languages that are easy to learn, in order to facilitate international commerce and diplomacy. Fiction writers may create one to help "fill out" the realms of their invented universe. Linguistics and grammarians might design a language to sharpen their academic skills in this area. And—if you're a nerd like me, at least—you'll do it because it's FUN!

So anyone who happens to read this, look forward to (ir)regular updates as I embark on a pointless, but fascinating, journey. Cheers!

Shocks, Pegs... Lucky!

2005-08-13T11:38:00.000-06:00

This is too cool for words... looks like Napoleon has borrowed his friend Pedro's Sledgehammer bike to do some competitive mountain-biking!