Word of the Day #3: Spider

ea-luna: ama
Nevashi (Ianea): noshodupu
Nevashi (Ashea): shodu
Laozhea: ebetsa

Word of the Day #2: Seed

English: seed
Nevashi: bov
Laozhea: esumena (edible), usumena (inedible)
ea-luna: mapu
Sesnezóne: sesne

Word of the Day #1: Frog

English: frog

Nevashi: kuka

Laozhea: elena (small, inedible frog), ulena (large, edible frog), eluna (toad)

ea-luna: mawa

...Time to go create a word for frog in Sesnezóne.

Things to Translate.

Translation is one of the best ways to find and patch the holes and weak spots in your conlang. But what to translate? This is your lucky day! I am going to post some links to things you might consider translating. 

One of the standards is the "Babel text" or the story of the tower of Babel from the Bible. That's Genesis 11: 1-9. I am going to link that from Bible Gateway because you can switch between English translations there pretty easily, and that can be useful in deciding how to translate it yourself. LINK OF BABEL

If you aren't into the Bible so much, you might try The North Wind and the Sun. It is one of Aesop's fables and there are several slightly different versions floating around out there. Here's one of them: NORTH WIND AND THE LINK

Looking for some sentences of increasing complexity to have a go at? How about Graded Sentence for Analysis? SENTENCES FOR LINK

If that's not your cup of hot caffeinated beverage, you might try the American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels: NOVELLINK

But what if you're well beyond translating sentences or short passages? Project Gutenberg to the rescue! Two popular choices are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Tale of Peter Rabbit. If that's too juvenile for you, perhaps you could try Metamorphosis -- nothing is more Kafkaesque than Kafka. If that's not your style, perhaps you'd like to have a stab at Pride and Prejudice. Still not your style? Check your bookshelves! You've undoubtedly got something good there!

Sesnezóne: A Seed Language. A Language Seed.

I had intended to use Lexember to work on a one-month, one-off, minimalist conlang, but that didn't work out due to finals and family, so I was excited when I saw Languary on Tumblr. We're half-way through the month, and my languary project is coming right along. It has some of the same basic ideas I am using in Shelis/Shellese, another project I've been working on, but it's certainly not the same language by any means.

My vision for this project is as a "seed language" for some collaborative conlanging. I'd like to put it out there on the February 1 for people to expand, remix, and use as they see fit, preferably with each other. It's a sort of Play Auxiliary Language-- a linguistic toy I am sharing with other kids on the playground, so to speak. I don't know if anyone will play along, but I'll offer it up, anyway. I certainly hope that someone better than me at designing writing systems comes along.

In the meantime, there's a lot more work for me to do to get it into shape before the official release date. I am having a good deal of fun with it, and I hope other people will too.

Sesnezóne: A Seed Language

Vowels: a æ e i ɔ o u  <a á e i ó o u>  Diphthongs: ai au
Consonants: b p t d k g l m n h s z ʃ ʒ f v j <b p t d k g l m n h s z c j f v y>

Syllables: (C)V(C) ; Stress (TBD—penultimate?)

Flexible SVO; [S(InO/Oblique)VO]; pronouns are obligatory.

Nouns and Pronouns use the same case and number markings in the order: root-number-case.   Pronouns: 1^st  ye / 2^nd  tó / 3^rd  ku

Plural: -se

Cases: Nominative (null), Accusative (-mim), Ablative (-ken), Locative (-bai), Instrumental (-vif), Dative (-tui), Genitive (-sis)

Articles:  definite: yi ; indefinite: go (=one) /Demonstratives: cu (this), ze (that), jen (that over there); Articles and demonstratives occur to the left of the noun.

Adjectives follow nouns they modify. Cardinal numbers come before the noun, but ordinal numbers follow the noun. Adverbs usually follow the verbs they modify. Relative clauses follow the noun and begin with cue.

Verbs: Every verb contains one of the 7 verb roots, which can be used alone or as part of a compound or derived word. Verbs are not marked for person or number. Adverbs/Adverbial phrases follow the verb, before the Object [in the usual word order].

The 7 verb roots:  Be, si; do/make, fa; have, ge; go, lá; say, zó; think, tu; perceive (physical senses), ko

Past  -na, Historical  Past -nana; Future -cá

Causative ke- , Potential an-, Conditional pe-, Imperative -zu; Perfect is expressed by putting “manu” (“already”) before the verb, rather than in its usual place following the verb; Inceptive prefix ses- (before other prefixes) Hearsay-evidential omne-

Negation: Double negation with negation (lo) at front of sentence and as the last element of the verb: lo… verb(lo), except with the imperative, where it appears only at the end of the verb.

Questions:

Polar (Y/N): Begin with question particle, gá.  Gá tó si go bayen? (Gá you are a person? = Are you a person?)

Interrogative words appear where they would in a declarative sentence. Who= gába What= gáne Where= gáhe When= gáhá  Why= gádón How= gáko

Prepositional phrases appear directly after the thing that they describe. (As in English: the book on the shelf)

Other Affixes (often also used as roots):

Toward/Together hu-

·         kehusi, attach, combine

·         hulá , go to

·         huculá, come

Away from/Apart va-

·         kevasi, separate

·         kevafa, cut off, slice (causative+apart+be)

·         kelá, to leave, go away from

Tool -fi

Person -ba

Person (Participant/Occupational) –fása

Place –hema

Thing (concrete/observable) -ne

Thing/Idea (abstract/unobservable) -ua

Time (of/for) -hánu

Group of  -dos

·         fiendos, toolset

·         hemados, area

Hard/Solid dó

·         dótu, believe (as a sort of “hardened” or more concrete thought)

Soft/Liquid  mai-

·         maitu, feel (emotionally, or gut feeling about something, a “softer” thought)

Nominalizer(General) –(y)en [insert ‘y’ following vowels except i.]

·         dosen, group

·         bayen, person

·         fien, tool

Adj  -(y)ec (y following vowels except i)

·         dóyec, hard, solid

·         maiec, soft, liquid, fluid

Adv -mu, -nu

·         vamu, apart, separately

·         humu, together

·         vanu, from, away from

·         hunu, to, toward

dón, because

sua, if  (…fia, then)

kinca, although

hádo, since

lona, despite, in spite of

ses begin (root); inceptive when prefixed to another verb

sesne: seed, starting point

sesua: (a) beginning

sessi, to become

sesfa, to begin, start (to do something)

seslá, to begin (to move)

zóne – language

lázófi – (mobile) telephone 

Sesnezóne by Mia DeSanzo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Few Sites

This is not a real post. There will be real posts soon. In the meantime, here are some websites I've looked at or used recently.

Conworkshop CWS is a conlanging community site that allows you to document and share your languages. I'm digging the vibe.

Konlangerz is another community site where you can share your language.

Fontstruct, which has an easy-to-use tool to build and then download your own fonts (in your browser).

Myscriptfont.com is another site for generating your own font from handwriting on a template. I haven't used it myself (yet), but I have seen things created with it on Facebook.

And for fun, Colorless Language Generator -- I have spent way too much time refreshing that page.

2014: Laozhea

I have wanted to create a new language toy to play with for a long time, but now I am actually doing it. It's called Laozhea. Don't think that I don't take it seriously just because I call it a "toy." I take my toys very seriously.

All of my conlangs have a common purpose at the base of them: they are meant to be used, in some capacity, even if it is only by me. Ea-luna was also an experiement in method and was meant to break me out of the rut that my first conlanging efforts had dug for me. Nevashi was originally created to be a project built in the open, shared on the Internet as it was developing. Both languages had a fictional culture of some sort attached to them, but they were both intended to for general purpose use in this world as well. Laozhea makes this its central purpose. This is a language I am building for my own everyday use.

I want to learn the language as I create it. That's the end goal for this project. Any culture built around it will be in this world, for my own amusement. I love the idea of creating artifacts from fictional worlds and cultures, so it may even make an appearance in the real world. (At the very least, I'd like to paint a "Welcome" sign for my house.)

The very first thing ever translated into Laozhea was a quote from The Addams Family: "Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." (It seemed appropriate, somehow.) This is what it looks like in Laozhea, written very messily with a mouse in MSPaint:

Samza lafeda. Tia samza n'ebetsa, tia bekeda n'emeska.
Normal illusion. Same normal (of/for) spider, same wrongness (of/for) fly.

Not a verb in sight! I do have some verbs waiting in the wings, but this didn't require any. The "same...same" construction is an idiom lifted straight out of ea-luna.

All the words end in -a because they are all in the same noun class/gender (animate/abstract/action) or agree with one of those nouns (in the case of tia). I was going to say something about na, but it isn't obvious that it also (coincidentally) ends in "a", since it lost its "a" to the following initial vowel.

Na is a sort of all-purpose connector and preposition. In addition to "of" and "for," it can also mean "to", "toward", "at", etc. In some contexts, it might mean "with." I am working out several different functional words that will probably do some heavy lifting; I found that was one of the things that worked very well in ea-luna, for whatever other flaws the language may have had.

Bekeda covers a whole range of disorder, insanity, sin, clutter, and general wrongness. The similarity to "pecado" is entirely coincidental; I only noticed it sometime after the initial creation of the word. That will be a handy memory tool though.

The similarity of emeska to "mosca," on the other hand, is entirely intentional. It has a good memory hook for me. Likewise. ebetsa for "spider" comes from "itsy bitsy". Other words have no basis in any language I know, but seemed to be right at the time (samza, lafeda). This method seems to be working, since I was able to remember every word and exactly what each one does in those sentences.

More remarkably, I could re-write it without referring to my notebook if I wanted to. I usually create writing systems later, after I've already gotten used to seeing the language in the Latin alphabet, but this is the other main point about Laozhea-- the writing system and the language are being developed together.  It's a logographic writing system, which turns out to be a whole lot of work, and I spend a lot of time drawing, redrawing, and evolving each logogram. I think this is turning out to be good for the language and for my learning of it. (It's being developed as if intended to be written with a ballpoint pen. I figured I might as well go with the tool I will actually be using.)

This is my project for 2014.