Post by Magnizeal on Nov 10, 2009 17:17:42 GMT -5
Yup. That's my goal... So, where to start... ^^ First, I guess I'll show the sounds I'm using... Dental, Alveolar, Alveolar-palletal, and velar, you can look those terms up on Wikipedia. It's roughtly where the tounge stops the air flow. The first in a pair is unvoiced, the second is voiced.
So, yeah. As a side note, I hate making tables. Now, I don't have them all worked out, but I do have some letters. You can check them here if you want. Those are all I have yet... The writing system began as an abjad, but morphed into a more normal alphabet. It's written left to right, like English, but vertical, like Chinese used to be. The vowels go on the right of the consonants, like in this example. The rounded forms are brush form, the angular for carving.
Now, to the fun stuff! The words both inflect and agglutinate. Inflection is by changing the final vowel, agglutination is by adding a syllable whose vowel also changed. So. Nouns change by case and gender. I'm not sure which one is indicated by which yet. Thinking about it, it might actually be pure inflection... hum. Anyway.
I'm using the nominative, accusitive, dative, and genitive cases. One for each vowel. For those who don't know those names, the vowel cases are subject, direct object, indirect object, and possessive. I want my language to have a shifting word order, because it's supposed to be spoken in many different dialects.
There's also, essentially, gender. In this case, I'm using sapient, animate, inanimate, and abstract, which means you can make some pretty bad insults by calling someone by the animate or inanimate gender instead of the sapient gender. That's just kind of because I can.
Then you have verbs. They're changed the same way as nouns are. They have four aspects, the perfect, progressive, the frequentive, and the habitual. Basically, "It sparked once," "It is sparking," "It sparkled," and "It (habitually) sparked". They also change for mood, indicative, subjective, imperative, and negative. Basically, it did happen, it should/would be nice to happen, DO IT, and it didn't happen. So, sentences are negated by verb, not by added a word like in English. And, yes, they also change for tense. Far past, near past, present, near future, far future.
We're almost done! The stress on a word can change it (I don't have a stress mark yet, it would go to the right of the 't' in my example), and prounouns come in singular, plural, and inanimate. We can be inclusive (us and you) or exclusive (us but not you), You can be 'inclusive' (general you) or 'exclusive' (you specifically). AND, as you might have seen from the letters, they use a base 6. Which is just fun for me.
So... That's what I'm doing. ... If you feel like suggesting letters for me, I'd be happy. >.> I'll try to restrain myself from explaining how I came up with the letters I have so far. If you notice anything badly missing, even at this stage, feel free to tell me.
All work inspired by The Language Construction Kit. ^^
| dental | alv | Alv-pal | velar | |
| stop | t, d | k, g | ||
| Fricative | th, dh | s, z | sh, zh | kh, h |
| affricate | ts, dz | ch, j | ||
| approximant | r, l | y | ||
| nasal | n | ng |
So, yeah. As a side note, I hate making tables. Now, I don't have them all worked out, but I do have some letters. You can check them here if you want. Those are all I have yet... The writing system began as an abjad, but morphed into a more normal alphabet. It's written left to right, like English, but vertical, like Chinese used to be. The vowels go on the right of the consonants, like in this example. The rounded forms are brush form, the angular for carving.
Now, to the fun stuff! The words both inflect and agglutinate. Inflection is by changing the final vowel, agglutination is by adding a syllable whose vowel also changed. So. Nouns change by case and gender. I'm not sure which one is indicated by which yet. Thinking about it, it might actually be pure inflection... hum. Anyway.
I'm using the nominative, accusitive, dative, and genitive cases. One for each vowel. For those who don't know those names, the vowel cases are subject, direct object, indirect object, and possessive. I want my language to have a shifting word order, because it's supposed to be spoken in many different dialects.
There's also, essentially, gender. In this case, I'm using sapient, animate, inanimate, and abstract, which means you can make some pretty bad insults by calling someone by the animate or inanimate gender instead of the sapient gender. That's just kind of because I can.
Then you have verbs. They're changed the same way as nouns are. They have four aspects, the perfect, progressive, the frequentive, and the habitual. Basically, "It sparked once," "It is sparking," "It sparkled," and "It (habitually) sparked". They also change for mood, indicative, subjective, imperative, and negative. Basically, it did happen, it should/would be nice to happen, DO IT, and it didn't happen. So, sentences are negated by verb, not by added a word like in English. And, yes, they also change for tense. Far past, near past, present, near future, far future.
We're almost done! The stress on a word can change it (I don't have a stress mark yet, it would go to the right of the 't' in my example), and prounouns come in singular, plural, and inanimate. We can be inclusive (us and you) or exclusive (us but not you), You can be 'inclusive' (general you) or 'exclusive' (you specifically). AND, as you might have seen from the letters, they use a base 6. Which is just fun for me.
So... That's what I'm doing. ... If you feel like suggesting letters for me, I'd be happy. >.> I'll try to restrain myself from explaining how I came up with the letters I have so far. If you notice anything badly missing, even at this stage, feel free to tell me.
All work inspired by The Language Construction Kit. ^^
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