clare_dragonfly | Entries tagged with world: gavat

I missed yesterday (I'm still sick), so here's two days in one, possession and verbs!

Possession is formed by adding an i- to the front of the object being possessed.

Thus, "the Empress's father": kethat ivag

If you're using a pronoun, you can just slap the pronoun right onto the front of the word instead.

Thus, "my mother": eveg; "your parent": ruivug (I picked a random second person pronoun).

Verbs work similarly to Spanish verbs, in that the base verbs have one of three endings that are changed in a regular manner depending on what person and tense is being used.

The endings are -is, -us, and -uis.

I will get around to actually doing conjugations eventually, I swear.

The word order in Gavath is VSO, because VSO is the superior word order.

...yes, that's all for today. I have a cold.

Words for parent and Empress, as promised in the last post. Eventually I'll come up with nouns that don't refer to animals and therefore have just one form, rather than changing with the gender of the referent...

Parent (neuter): vug
Father: vag
Mother: veg

Emperor (neuter): kithat
Emperor (male): kathat
Empress: kethat

Today I've written honorifics. These would be appended to the name of the person you are addressing.

The honorifics are not gendered, but depend on the relative power and wisdom/education of the person you are addressing. For example, to an ordinary citizen, an Imperial officer would get the "powerful person" honorific (depending on age), while a librarian would get the "wise person" honorific. Addressing someone like a parent, you would usually not use any honorific at all, but you might add one if you want to add extra politeness. If I referred to my mother as "mother-uja," she would probably think I wanted something.

Wise person older: -uja
Wise person same age: -ija
Wise person younger: -eija
Powerful person older: -uhe
Powerful person same age: -ihe
Powerful person younger: -eihe
Simple politeness: -uru

The first set is roughly equivalent to "lord/lady," the second to "doctor," and the third to "Mr./Mrs."

For the Empress or another extremely powerful person, an ordinary citizen would probably use both honorifics: "Empress-uhe-uja," "O wise and powerful Empress." That brings the politeness to a groveling extreme. Naturally, ordinary citizens do not have the opportunity to use this much, and most people the Empress talks to would address her simply as "Empress-uhe" or, perhaps for family members, "Empress-uru."

Maybe tomorrow I'll come up with words for parents, important job titles, and Empress!

I've created the pronouns to help you distinguish among those different conjugations of gal!

(Note: Uh, as of this post the diacritic options when I type seem to have gone away. So I may not be typing them in the future. Let me know if you get confused. Maybe I'll switch to double letters for the long vowels or something.)

Singular pronouns are different for the different genders; I'll show them as "masculine/feminine/neuter."

1st singular: a/e/i
1st plural: lei
1st plural formal: elu
2nd singular formal: ani/eni/uni
2nd plural formal: el
2nd singular informal: rai/rei/rui
2nd plural informal: leir
3rd singular formal: na/ne/nu
3rd plural formal: ul
3rd singular informal: ja/je/ji
3rd plural informal: kei

And now for the future tense of gāl. There are almost certainly more tenses than these three simple ones, but they're the most straightforward to create!

1st singular (I will be): kā'
1st plural (we will be): kā'
1st plural formal: kā'
2nd singular formal: anā
2nd plural formal: anā
2nd singular informal: lā'ā
2nd plural informal: lā'ā
3rd singular formal: kul
3rd plural formal: kul
3rd singular informal: lā'ā
3rd plural informal: lā'ā

Again, pronouns or context will be needed to distinguish among the second person formal and third person informal conjugations.

Today I have the past tense of gāl, to be!

1st singular (I was): ti
1st plural (we were): ddi (∂i)
1st plural formal: tęnā
2nd singular formal: du
2nd plural formal: tur
2nd singular informal: du
2nd plural informal: dur
3rd singular formal: akī
3rd plural formal: kā
3rd singular informal: dinā
3rd plural informal: dinā

Yes, the second person singular is the same for formal and informal, and the third person informal conjugation is the same for singular and plural. You would need context and/or a pronoun to know which is being used.

I was ready to post yesterday, but I ran out of time after work, so here are the posts for both day 5 and day 6, ( under the cut! )

To make a noun plural, the final vowel becomes ī (for long vowels) or i (for short vowels).

What if the final vowel already is one of those, you ask?

Simple! That's not allowed! In the language reforms (that's the best term I can come up with for it), any word that had a final ī or i had it changed to u. Some dialects did not change, and that's considered a sign of the speaker being rural and/or uneducated.

The Sivrit, an important* minority, tend to not correctly pluralize nouns at all: instead of changing the final vowel, they add -el to words, which is how words are pluralized in the Sivrit language.

I've also added some diphthongs to the vowel complement of Gavāth: āi, ēi, and ui.

*Important in story terms, not in political terms within the empire.

Let's get some linguistic building blocks in.

definite article - u
indefinite article - ke
partitive article - nu

and: ī

This suggests to me that nouns should start with consonants. They probably won't all start with consonants, but I'm going with it as a general guideline.

Using the rough order of phoneme commonness from yesterday, I've come up with a name for the empire and its language.

Gavāt
Adjective form: Gavā† (Gavath; the Gavā† Empire)

(Note that I've edited yesterday's entry to give a little more information on how I'll represent the different vowel sounds.)

And now I know a little more about how words are formed: to turn a noun into an adjective, turn its final stop into the corresponding fricative. The g and k sounds don't have fricatives that are formed quite the same way; for those stops, the sound used would be rh.

And I guess that means nouns must end in a stop!

All the #Lexember posts last month got the conlang wheels churning in my brain--so I couldn't help but join in when I saw that #Languary is going on this month! I've started work on the languages of a broad fantasy world that's been in the back of my mind for a while, and I may work on all of them this month, but I'll be focusing on the main one.

This language, as I'm building it, is actually a dead language--it's the language used for everything official by the empire that rules a large chunk of this world, and it is not used as the vernacular anymore. It's been wrangled pretty severely for regularity and strict structure. I may include some information on what the vernacular forms are like when I get to actual vocabulary (there are at least two other languages spoken widely in the empire, and the primary one does draw heavily on this language).

Anyway, what I have so far is the phonemes. Below the cut are consonants, and then vowels, in rough order of how common they are.
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There once was a man of our people who had a secret hidden under his lands.

This was in the old country, you understand, child—the land where our ancestors came from, where we had lands and fields and crops and cattle. The lands I speak of were not like the tiny window box we have in our Sivrit ghetto, nor even the great city of Rhakah, where he might have a yard as big as a coffin.

The lands that hid the secret were as big as the city of Rhakah, and bigger. They went as far as the eye can see, and farther. They were as wide as the arms of a loving father, and wider.

The man of our people had his sheep, and he fed and watered them on his lands. He had his crops, and he grew and plowed them on his lands. He had his children, and he worked and reared them on his lands.

But under it all he had a secret. The sheep did not know it, the crops did not know it, and even the children did not know it.

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