This is one of many script-posts to come. In other words, this is the script I will use for my video on these conlangs. Since the video is to be bilingual, where I need to stop and translate, I will insert the symbol 🇹.
ʃ̶̀ś̶ᛩ͡͞ᛐ- ʃ̶̀ś̶ɹ̃ƨ̶́Cᛩ͡͞ᛐś̶-ƨ̶̤́ᛩ͡͞ᛐ/̴̥0, ǿ̨̱̀̃Ɔ˘ᛩ͡͞ᛐƆ˘-ɹ̃ƨ̶́Cᛩ͡͞ᛐś̶!
/ʃti-ʃtɛs’bit-ɬima/, /eviv-’ɛsbit/!
*Some kind of "Whaaa?" meme.*
Hi everyone! 🇹 And welcome to MickConlangs 🇹. In this video, I will discuss my three attempts at constructing a language during High School. 🇹
A long long time ago, at a time when my diary wasn't yet a thing (gosh this is old!), apparently on 29/7/2008 🇹 (though I have a memory associating this with England, which I came back from within the first 10 days of July at most 🇹), I sat down, created a new Word file, and in it, I came up with a script, and started creating a language. 🇹
But before we get into that, I want to discuss something else. 🇹 This is something even older, which resurfaced from an old notebook as I looked for interesting tidbits for my Operation: megadiary (cfr. my blog's todo list), 🇹 something which, when I saw it staring me down from an old notebook, I went «What the Norse Underworld Goddess is this?». Boy was that creative mincing… but don't worry: the Italian version is even worse :). 🇹 So here are the images of that notebook:🇹
So immediately you get a small taste of the weirdness of my notebooks from back then: there is a date in Japanese on the right in pic 1, saying 13/11/2007, and in fact, on the left page of pic 2 (which I cropped out as it is irrelevant here), there is the date 26/11/2007. 🇹
But what in the world is this thing? And what does it have to do with "Lin. A", this undecyphered mysterious script? 🇹 Well, to the latter question, I don't have an answer. I tried to replicate the glyphs with the Linear A characters from Unicode, and they are nowhere to be found. Or at least, the stop symbol isn't. 🇹
Stop symbol? What do I mean? 🇹 Well, I'm guessing I'd just learnt a bunch of phonetic jargon when I came up with this, because it's really a phonetic alphabet. 🇹 More precisely, it is a 1-to-1 mapping of a subset of the IPA onto these weird symbols. 🇹
So. Consonants are described by manner of articulation, place of articulation, and voice. 🇹 Of course, in the real world, there are several more parameters, but this script does not care about that :). 🇹 Each consonant has a base glyph for the manner of articulation, and two superscript glyphs for the other two features. 🇹 Oh, and there's the lateral diacritic too, which, just like the place of articulation diacritics, is very pictographic. 🇹 I mean, most place of articulation diacritics are literal depictions of tongue positions, or lip positions for bilabial and labiodental, and then there's epiglottal and glottal which Idk how I came up with them. 🇹 I mean, just look:
Each manner of articulation has a natural "subintended" (aka "implied") place of articulation which need not be specified with its diacritic. 🇹 I have no idea how I came up with these glyphs, except for the F-looking thing for fricatives, which with "lab.den. subint." (labiodental implied) is probably just a stylysed F. 🇹
Then there's the voicing diacritics, which are like, this means voice (for whatever reason), and for no voice (so voiceless consonants) you just cross it out. 🇹 Judging by the examples at the bottom-right of the page, it seems voice is implied when we're talking nasals and approximants. 🇹
Yo, I even handled coarticulation? I had gone mad with power from the IPA knowledge, I guess :). I mean, having a character in a "tema" (an essay? how do you even translate that?) have two coarticulated consonants in 5 syllables, Angmaihwaglio /aŋ͡maj'h͡waʎo/, is a pretty solid indicator of "mad with power", don't you think :)? 🇹 Anyway, coarticulation was just "add ligature when needed", just like in IPA. 🇹
And now we come to the vowels. Those are described by openness, frontness, and rounding:🇹
So the "close" symbol seems pictorial, the "open" symbol may be an open mouth with the tongye far from the roof if you squint hard enough, not sure about the "mid" symbol, and I can't quite understand how "near-" vowels were supposed to be handled, I guess I add that thingy in the place where the "mid" goes when doing open-mid and close-mid? 🇹 The frontness diacritics are clearly pictorial, and the stress mark is just a thingy to put on the vowel, wherever you have space.
So besides the examples in the page itself, I came up with three more: 🇹
[Here I will have the sheet in my hand and comment on the transcriptions, so here's the image of the sheet.]
But let's get back to picture 1. 🇹 That seems rather different. From the looks of it, it seems I was going for a syllabary, like Linear A probably was, where the diacritics would give the nature of the consonants. 🇹 Indeed, you see pretty much the same list of diacritics, but then there's a table with consonant-vowel cells. 🇹 My guess is that those consonants were just to serve as the implied places of articulations, to be modified with the diacritics. 🇹 Of course, this is purely speculation, as there is no indication of this anywhere in the page, and I have no memory of any of this whatsoever. 🇹
But let's get back to my first conlang, shall we? 🇹 All I know about it comes from a file that is both created and modified 29/7/2008 12:15. This is bullshit, of course, because there's no way that file took just a minute. I assume the file was downloaded and got the metadata of the downloading time. 🇹 The file just throws the alphabet chart right at us. 🇹 It is so large I can't get a single pic of it, so I will go bit by bit. 🇹 There is basically nothing in the way of where the heck these symbols came from. Like, why does the h-sound /h/ look like butt cheeks "(("? 🇹 There are however a couple clear patterns to this script. Let's start from plosives, fricatives, and affricates:🇹
From this, we can see three patterns:🇹
As for etymology, well, aside from patterns, let's see. 🇹 The H for dental plosives might be supposed to represent teeth, though that would suggest a bidental sound. 🇹 The theta or theta symbol probably is used because the sound it represents in Greek is precisely a dental fricative. 🇹 The voiced glottal fricative is mapped to "erm", the "Idk what to say next" sound. 🇹 The glottal stop is just an air blockage. 🇹
But that is of course not the full chart. Indeed, we have way more symbols. I won't show you pics though, because the rest of the chart is pretty sparse. 🇹
We have a total of 5 symbols for nasals: /̴̥ or o͊, ᴝ, |ʅ, Δ̤, and Δ̤̀, respectively bilabial, alveolar (also used by assimilation for labiodental and dental), palatal, velar, and uvular. 🇹
But why are there two symbols for some sounds? Well, the file explains that:🇹
«Where there are two symbols for the same sound, it depends on the position of said sound in the word which symbol you use, like the greek sigma (σ, ς).». 🇹
The sounds this applies to are the bilabial nasal (aka M), the alveolar lateral approximant (aka L), the voiceless uvular affricate (aka basically a k + the ch of Bach), and maybe the open back unrounded vowel (aka ah in father), though that one explicitly states «ɑ͞͠ɒ or ɑ͞ɒ, you choose which to use.», as we will see, so maybe the two were supposed to be fully interchangeable. 🇹
We have three trills: bilabial C̤̃, evidently modeled on the voiced plosive, then alveolar ᴝ̇, apparently inspired by the nasal, and uvular Ĩ̸, looking an awful lot like the voiced affricate. 🇹 It is noted that «In intervocalic positions, trills turn to taps. I will indicate them as trills in IPA, but remember to use taps instead.». 🇹
There are six approximants: alveolar ᴝ̇̃, again inspired by the nasal, alveolar lateral l̶ or +, as said above it has two glyphs, then palatal ᛩ͡͡ᛐ, the flipped version ᛇ͡ᚹ which is labio-palatal (as in French "lui"), the palatal lateral \ (Italian gl), and the labio-velar ʌ͡v /w/. Finally, the lateral fricatives are denoted as ƨ̤́ and ƨ̶̤́. 🇹 As for vowels, here is the table: 🇹
Note how the vowels which, in short form, become approximants ("semivowels" if you will) are the same as their approximant form, 🇹 except the ͡ becomes a ͞ . 🇹 Also, /ɯ/ is constructed as a variation of /u/, basically an unrounding diacritic, which one could use to unround /o/ as well. 🇹 Curiously, /ɔ/ isn't in the equation, perhaps morally replaced by /ɑ/ as if cot-caught merging.
«Stress can be marked with bold or with a tilde above. Labiodental plosives are extremely rare and quite hard to pronounce: you can turn them to bilabials with no misunderstandings.», says the file. 🇹
And then the language is introduced: 🇹 «This is a New Language’s own Script. Below you find a grammar of this New Idioma (in that language ermᛩ͡͡ᛐʌ͡v0 ᛩ͡͡ᛐ0Δ̤υ¿0 /'ɦjawa 'jaŋgʕa/). Its name is ᛇ͡ᚹᛩ͡͞ᛐΔ̤υᛩ͡͞ᛐ ᛚ̶̽0ᴝ̇̃ʌ͞vᴝᛩ͡͞ᛐ /ɥiŋgi’ɕaɹuni/ or, anglicized, Wingisharunian. It has also an easier colloquial name: Gungish (υʌ͞vΔ̤υᛩ͡͞ᛐ /’guŋgi/).».
At which point, we go into the grammar, of course. I planned to give it complete grammar, but only got as far as what seems to be a partial conjugation of "to be". 🇹
«The verb “to be” is the only Gungish irregular verb. Its irregularity is given by its three different verbal stems (ʃ̶̀ś̶ʌ͞vϋ̶̤ - /ʃtuk/, ɹ̃ƨ̶́Cᛩ͡͞ᛐś̶, /ɛsbit/, ǿ̨̱̀̃ Ĩ̸ƨ̶́ś̶0ᴝ̇, /eʀstar/) that mix together in some tenses. The first stem comes from estou (pronounced /ʃtu/), portuguese for I was, the second one is from es(se), latin for to be and be /bi/, and the third one’s from ê(t)r(e) and (es)tar, respectively French and Spanish for to be. Here is its complete conjugation». 🇹 Looks like my Portuguese was real shaky, since "estou" neither is pronounced that way (it's /ʃtou) nor means "I was" (it means "I am"). 🇹 I wonder if I would ever have come up with an explanation for the stem mixing. 🇹 Here is the conjugation table: 🇹
So now we can finally translate the "sentence" I started with: «HSheIt was, be ye!». Yeah, not much sense. I don't have much to go with, since that's about all I have of this language, but I guess I'd take it to mean either «[Like] he was, be ye!», or «He is dead: come ye into existence!» (you know, "Ei fu"). 🇹
We do have one more sentence from the file: «For the continuous tenses, you add a special augment at the beginning, which is |ʅᛩ͡͞ᛐ /ɲi/. It comes from the English suffix –ing written right to left (gni–) and pronounced in an Italian way (gn in Italian is pronounced ɲ).». OK, two sentences I guess :). 🇹
Why do I say this isn't a complete conjugation? Because how are you going to render "past continuous" or "pluperfect" or such? You have a full set of present tenses (no participles gerunds or infinitives, but you can definitely do without those), but then the perfect only has the indicative: that is not enough! 🇹
Then again, I can definitely come up with all the remaining perfect moods in a way that might have been my idea back then. 🇹 Indeed, if you look at present, you see stem + suffixes. 🇹 Going to subjunctive, you just change the suffix's vowel to -e- (or -in for the first-person singular). 🇹 Then for the conditional you add in the morpheme -jere- plus the final consonant of the indicative, contracting the third-person plural from -jerestsin to -jestsin. 🇹 The imperative has its set of prefixes which tack on to the stem. 🇹 The 2p and 3p prefixes are the corresponding subjunctive suffixes, the 2s one is the indicative suffix, the 1p one is a slight variation of the subjunctive one, the 1s one is a variation of the indicative one, and the 3s one is a blend of conditional and indicative. 🇹 Applying similar changes, and deciding to make some sort of vowel harmony in conditional perfect with all the -jere turning some final vowels to -e, we get the following: 🇹
But that still doesn't give me past continuous, does it? 🇹 So either this was not the full tense set, or I was taking "perfect" to mean some kind of generic past, maybe a past simple, 🇹 and then past continuous would be past simple with the special augment ɲi-, 🇹 and then I could conceive pluperfect as past continuous plus reduplication, so ɲe-ɲi, 🇹 giving us two reduplications, one from the perfect, one from the pluperfect, 🇹 with forms like ɲe-ɲi-ʃti-'ʃtɛsbit-ɥɛn "I had been". But this is just speculation. 🇹
What is clear is that any other verb would have used the same suffix set and reduplication rule, but with its own stem. 🇹 I have mentally created the conjugation for "to study" with the root stud-, but I will not create a full conjugation table. 🇹
As a closing remark before the next Conlang, note how I was inconsistent in the positional use of the two glyphs for /m/, using õ as both medial and final. 🇹 Or maybe the intention was to distinguish syllable-final and otherwise, and thus the ɥam-ɛsbit is correctly spelled with the final m? 🇹 Instructions unclear, or inconsistent, and besides, is that really the syllabification of that form? 🇹 Anyway, that's it for Wingisharunian. 🇹
And did I mention I actually tried to figure out how to design a font that would convert regular letters into this weird script, like Symbol converts them into Greek letters? Well, now I have :). 🇹
🎵F̮o|̊🌳 wŏ↓̨̆ᛉO·↓o wŏ↑̨ᛉO·↑ 🌳|̊C↑† ⃓-ˡ↓🌳 --𐇽̈o|̊🎵
🎵Wíla fĭę́rdei fĭų́rdu álþux neañíl🎵
OMG what a nightmare it is to type those glyphs… does anyone know that tune? It just popped into my mind some time ago, and Idk where it is from… Zoey's extraordinary playlist, maybe? 🇹
Anyway, as you can see, the script changed, so this must be a new conlang of mine. 🇹 The script was invented during Latin class on 16/1/2009. Here is the glyph table in my diary: 🇹
Here is how I copied it in Word back then: 🇹
And here is how I copied it into my LaTeX diary last year: 🇹
I show all this so you can see the differences between versions, and also how terrible it comes out on computer, which is why I, from now on, will only show you pictures of handwritten script, using the transliteration below for typing purposes. 🇹
Anyway, let us list the glyphs, and explain their etymologies, which are much better documented this time: 🇹
So 5 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative. No vocative. 🇹 Nominative suffix is patently Latin, genitive is explicitly traced to latin, dative is from Italian "ad" = "to", accusative is from "al" taken to mean "to the", and ablative is -a + "x", which in Italian is often used to abbreviate "per", which here is considered for a causal meaning. 🇹 Super simple. 🇹 Plural changes the vowel (-a -> -e, also seems Latin, but ecclesiastical). 🇹 Stick -som to this -e, and you get -esom. 🇹 Why -som? Because rosarum comes from ros-a-som. 🇹 And then the same "case consonants" get tacked onto the -e… except the -x becomes -k, from "con" meaning "with". 🇹
The first inflection table is for wila, stem wil-, from English "whale" /weil/ mangled into /wi:/ (basically "wheel"). 🇹
So reading this in declension order, 🇹 wíla, wílæ, wílad, wílal, wílax, and plural🇹 wíle, wilésom, wíled, wílel, wílek. Just as the suffixes would suggest. 🇹
But wait a second. 🇹 The diary, before giving it, states that genitive singular ends in -y for masculine and -ë for neuter, and that those thematic vowels (-a and -e) become -i/-e for masculine and -u/-y for neuter. 🇹 Well actually the -y part is inferred from the table, it is not marked in the diary before giving examples. 🇹 By the way, did I mention that all of this is written into the Latin diary I had basically just started keeping at that point in time? 🇹 Anyway, the masculine example is neañí, "young man", from Greek νεανίας. 🇹
And once again, reading as in the table, 🇹 neañí, neañý, neañíd, neañíl, neañíx, and plural🇹 neañé, neañésom, neañéd, neañél, neañék. Just as we'd expect from the suffixes and stem. 🇹 As for the neuter, we have álþu, presumably "contest", from Greek ἆθλον:🇹
And once again, reading it out, 🇹 álþu, álþë, álþud, álþul, álþux, and plural🇹 álþyn, alþýsom, álþyd, álþyl, álþyk. So now we can start translating that thing at the start of this conlang: 🇹 «Wíla fĭę́rdei fĭų́rdu álþux neañíl», «The whale ?? ?? in a contest the young man (obj.)». 🇹
To complete the translation, we advance by one day, to 23/1/2009, where, after completing a translation test for Latin, I sit in class and come up with the second declension. 🇹 Here is the suffix table for masculine: 🇹
So the singular is mostly from the Greek endings, minus the Latin genitive (I wonder if the -e- is because of archaic -ei?), and the seemingly arbitrary ablative. 🇹 The first two plural endings are from Greek, the dative is a flipped version of Latin -is or the -si that appears in some archaic datives like θύρῃσι… 🇹 and then the accusative plural is unclear. 🇹 The -us suffix still seems to be Greek, and that -ους which seems to follow would confirm it, but it's muddled. 🇹 Maybe my intention with that mess was to cross it out completely, then writing this is -os from Latin plus an "apophony" giving me -u instead of -o? 🇹 Or maybe -os was supposed to be an "apophony" variant of -us, and was to be completely forgotten when writing an example of such apophony nouns? 🇹 Does that say "u apoph" or "n apoph"? 🇹 I guess that is -os with -ους on top of it and then scribbled over, followed by "-os ụ apoph". 🇹 The ablative is then -ɔsi, allegedly from Latin -is, although the vowel is arbitrary. 🇹 Maybe it's a combo of singular and plural Latin ablatives -ō and -īs? 🇹
We are then told feminine is the same as masculine, and given the following neuter ending table: 🇹
So -on from Greek and -o from Latin, and the rest are variations of the masculine for the singular. 🇹 The plurals are messy, but in the end I settled, in the example, for -oa, -uron, -si, -ua, -osi. 🇹 So now we have the neuter example: 🇹
Stem fɔil- from folium in Latin with metathesis, means "sheet". 🇹 Note the continued laziness of just writing the suffixes and not repeating the stem. 🇹 Anyway, the forms are 🇹 fɔ́ilon, fɔilɛ́i, fɔ́ilo, fɔ́ilun, fɔ́ilu for the singular, and for the plural 🇹 fɔilóa, fɔilúron, fɔ́ilsi, fɔ́ilua, fɔ́ilosi. And now for the masculine example, which is buxos "book" from German Buch. 🇹
Búxos, búxei, búxoĭ (and that is where I realized I never created a letter for /j/ in my script, 🇹 so I just slapped a breve onto the /i/ letter and called it a day, 🇹 perhaps inspired by Cyrillic и/й, 🇹 and did the same in the transliteration too 🇹) búxon, búxu. Plural búxoi, buxúon, búxesi, búxus, buxɔ́si.
But it does not end here, because some nouns have ablaut. 🇹 In other words, some nouns will have a vowel in the stem changing throughout the inflection, and that vowel will always be marked with an ogonek. 🇹 There is a table of these ablaut changes, but let me just skip to the example, namely fĭord- "fĭord", masculine. 🇹
Look at the laziness with which I just repeat the vowel instead of the whole stem for the singular :)! 🇹 fǐǫ́rdos, fǐę́rdei, fǐǫ́rdoi, fǐǫ́rdon, fǐų́rdu, and plural 🇹 fǐǫ́rdoi, fǐęrdúon, fǐǫrdési, fǐǫ́rdus, fǐųrdɔ́si. Easy. 🇹 And now we can finally complete the translation: 🇹 «The whale of the fǐord in the fǐord [defeated] the young man in a contest». 🇹 Couldn't do much more with just nouns, could I? 🇹
The diary of 24/1/2009 mentions "a bit of Gungish" (un po' di Gunghese). 🇹 It's not clear if I made something more for this language, which then got lost, 🇹 or if I reviewed it, or if I went back to the older Gungish from above, perhaps expanding on it, 🇹 or just reviewing it for whatever reason. 🇹 Whatever the case, this will probably stay a mystery forever, because nothing more is said about it either in the handwritten diary or in the copied version. 🇹
We then skip to 27/1/2009 for declension 3, here is the suffix table. 🇹 Curiously, it only has the singular. 🇹
So -s, typical third declension nominative singular, or alternately the mysterious -ɔ, 🇹 then the Greek -os for the genitive, 🇹 -ro for the dative which is mysterious, 🇹 -m possibly inspired by Latin -em, or just the -m of accusatives, with the optional (u) for euphony (think euphonic nu of some Greek verbs), 🇹 and ablative -e explicitly traced to Latin. 🇹 This was all done during an oral test of Latin, btw. 🇹
The last bit of this Conlang was made on 30/1/2009, during, once again, Latin class. 🇹 Suddenly we have plural suffixes, and a couple full declension tables. 🇹 The first one is for mænɔ "man", from "man" of course. 🇹
mænɔ, mænos, mænro, mænmu > mæmmu, mæne, and plural 🇹 mænes, mænom, mænbus > mæmbus, mænasu, mænbust > mæmbust. So we have assimilation in this paradigm, and let's look at the plural suffixes. 🇹 -es, clearly Latin. 🇹 -om, archaic Latin = -um. 🇹 -bus, Latin again. 🇹 -asu, Idk. Maybe from Greek -as plus -u, which maybe is euphonic like in the singular. 🇹 Why the ablative gains the final -t, Idk. 🇹 No indication of gender, unfortunately.
And the same is true of the other example, truks, from French trousse "pencil case", thus probably meaning that. 🇹
Was that "trux" an irregularity I scrapped, or just me collapsing -ks into X and then remembering that's another sound? 🇹 Anyway, 🇹 truks, trukos, trukro, truks, truke. Oh look, nominative and accusative are the same, so this must be neuter and the other one masculine/feminine, since nom=acc is a prerogative of neuters as per the suffix table. 🇹 I was about to forget that, and make this accusative trukmu assimilated to trugmu. 🇹 And the plurals also reflect the neuter: 🇹 truka, trukom, trukbus > trugbus, truka, trukbust > trugbust. 🇹
And with that, the last thing from that day, and the last in general since it doesn't seem I ever came back to this conlang, is the rules for assimlation, which I will just let you check out for a while. 🇹
Unfortunately I never gave this thing a name back then. 🇹 However, I recently concocted one. 🇹 I tried to render "new language" into it. 🇹 I had to create both words, of course. 🇹 And also decide how adjective morphology was going to work. 🇹 The latter was easy: just inflect like second declension masculine and neuters, and first declension feminines, just like Latin. 🇹 This is an idea from 6/11/23, which is also when I came up with the words. 🇹 I'm not sure what order I invented them in, but "new" is ñyva, 🇹 which started from "new" /nju:/ mangled into ny, 🇹 got its inflectional -a, 🇹 got a -v- to avoid the hiatus, so we're at nyva, 🇹 and then got the n- palatalised to ñ-, 🇹 whereas "language" was špraxža, 🇹 from earlier lendža, a mangling of lingua/lengua, 🇹 mixed with German Sprache. 🇹 So this thing will be known as Ñýva špráxdža (--𐇽̈ʌ◉🌳 -+ʟ̑ᛉ🌳†Ợ̍🌳). 🇹
🎵Dzã ṁaẏal de ĺarèkxe óṅń🎵
What was that? 🇹 Heĺno/vľna lä/gū. 🇹 Which is just what I came up with for "new language" in this thing, on 6/11/23. 🇹 Heĺ-…-na, as we shall see, is basically inflection. 🇹 The root no/vľ "new" comes from "novella" in Italian. 🇹 As for lä/gū, that's the sum of French "langue" and Chinese yǔ, both meaning "language". 🇹 But honestly, if you'd asked me in 2012 when I created this thing, I would have replied in Chinese: 🇹 xīn de yǔ. Or maybe in English: 🇹 New Language. I mean, after all, the file I have about it is called 🇹 New Language - 新的语.
But back to that line: what is it? 🇹 It's supposed to translate line 1 of 🇹 Shôjo no koro ni modotta mitai ni, this beautiful Japanese song I badly mistranslated into a bunch of languages. 🇹 Good thing I never went further with this translation, 🇹 because the Chinese-Conlang translation we will be analyzing is just… 🇹 But what are those words? 🇹 Well, Dzã means "in/at/on", or something like that, from Chinese zài /dzaj/ shortened to just /dza/ and then nasalised. 🇹 Actually, the long vowel may mean I was thinking of how "I" is pronounced /a:/ in some English dialects. 🇹 Ṁaỵal means "dream". 🇹 In fact, presumably "the dream", since -l is the article (as we shall see). 🇹 De is the easiest, it's just Spanish for "of". 🇹 Ĺarèkxe is a mangling of Italian "parecchie", "many, several". 🇹 Óṅń means "time(s)" (by the way, that should be óṅńs, I guess), from Romanian "odată", where I truncated -ată, click-ified the -d-, and threw in a syllabic nasal for good measure. 🇹
With that out of the way, it's time for a phonetic chart of this thing, which uses an adaptation of the Latin alphabet (no new script this time, luckily). 🇹
Oh yeah, did I mention this whole thing was explained in Chinese? 🇹 I only started translating it to English back then, and finished… 🇹 in April 2018. I guess I was trying to put the Conlang translation on the blog back then, hence the need to dig up the noteblock this stuff is written on? 🇹 Anyway, the columns are bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar ("teeth-gums"), postalveolar, alveolo-palatal, palatal, velar, pharyngeal, and glottal. 🇹 The rows are voiceless and voiced plosives (which should be 塞音 sàiyīn, not 爆音 bàoyīn which means shockwave or sonicboom), 🇹 voiceless aspirated plosives, 🇹 clicks both central and lateral (which should be 喌音 zhōuyīn, not kǎkē), 🇹 implosives (which should be 内爆音 nèibàoyīn, not tǔyīn), 🇹 unreleased voiceless stops (which I don't know how it should be), 🇹 voiceless fricatives both central and lateral (and fricative is actually 擦音 cāyīn not chuīyīn), 🇹 voiced fricatives both central and lateral, 🇹 the corresponding affricates (破擦音 pùcāyīn, not bàuchuī), 🇹 trills, semivowels (approximants, actually) both central and lateral, and finally nasals. 🇹 So a good number of consonants, and some pretty weird conventions: 🇹 carons give lateral equivalents instead of going from alveolar to postalveolar, 🇹 dots give implosives and strokes remove releases, 🇹 c and j are the postalveolar fricatives and ś and ź the alveolo-palatal ones, 🇹 the velar nasal is ł (why?) 🇹 and the clicks… well, I had to come up with something :). 🇹
As for the vowels, we have a lot of variables: 🇹 10 qualities plus 5 syllabic consonants, 🇹 then length (long or short) and nasality (oral or nasal). 🇹 Oral short vowels are called "ordinary" :). 🇹 Finally, the stress is marked with a / after the stressed syllable. 🇹 Or, «重音的符号是在重音的音节后的“/”。» (/ is 斜线号 xiéxiànhào). 🇹 OK, I'mma stop with the Chinese :).🇹
We start out simple: one definite article -l, or -ul for euphony (because having a syllabic l for the article was too much :) ), like the Romanian article. 🇹 Then we have the indefinite article ka, from the Chinese classifier gè, which also serves as a partitive article with plurals, and even as a generic classifier. 🇹 Yes, there are classifiers. 🇹 Only two though: the generic one, which is completely optional, 🇹 and the one for «things always in pairs», rightfully a mangling of Chinese shuāng, which I turned into sṅong. 🇹 Influence from some Chinese dialect in that vowel? Maybe. 🇹
Noun inflection? Nope! No declension, no gender. Just the plural suffix -s, which as we have seen I wasn't too consistent on using. 🇹 Becomes -z when after a voiced consonant (wonder what happens with a vowel… guess -z still?), article goes before it. 🇹 So ṁaẏa, ṁaẏal, ṁaẏaz, ṁaẏalz, for dream the dream dreams the dreams. 🇹
Adjectives are where things start to get interesting. 🇹 Two classes: nominal adjectives and verbal adjectives. 🇹 I had "just" studied Japanese about a year prior, as it turns out :). 🇹 Nominal adjectives are uninflected, except for the plural -s. 🇹 So "several times" should be ĺarè/kxez óṅńz. 🇹 Verbal adjectives are basically verbs, and conjugate fully just like verbs. 🇹 If you want to use them adjectivally, you need to surround them with that heĺ-…-na from before. 🇹 The prefix heĺ- is from "rel(ative)", since a verb modifying a noun would be a relative clause, 🇹 while the suffix -na is another Japanism, from the -na of "Japanese adjectives". 🇹 Not sure if I was taking the -na of nominal adjectives, or the -na you can tack onto verbal ones like chiisai -> chiisana. 🇹 With that "rel", I may have been thinking of how Indonesian uses plain relative "yang" before many adjectives, or even of how the Chinese particle "de" can be both a relative clause marker and an adjective marker. 🇹
Verbs, however, are the big part of the morphology. 🇹 Verb forms are created by a simple "puzzle": 🇹 «Personal prefix + verb root (or “dictionary form”) + mood suffix (Indicative, Subjunctive, Optative, Imperative, Infinitive) + aspect suffix (aoristic or simple, progressive, perfective) + tense suffix (present, past, future)». 🇹 So apparently everything is perfectly regular and logical. 🇹 Except then I provided examples of these suffixes being "elided" in several ways, or being sort of contracted together, but we'll get there with the translation. 🇹 Looks like I originally thought of having tense before aspect, and then wrote an arrow to swap them. 🇹
So… what the hell are these personal prefixes? 🇹 Well, my model was almost surely Romagnolo… where there are clitic subject pronouns just like in French, except for whatever reason I analysed them as part of the conjugation. 🇹 I doubt I had the influence of Bantu languages back then, where I'd have seen concords and gone: "Look! Just like Romagnolo!". 🇹 Anyway, here is the table of these "prefixes": 🇹
So we have "a" for "I", from a mangling of "I" and/or the Romagnolo "prefix" a. 🇹 Then "i", from the vowel of the Chinese pronoun nǐ "you (singular), thou". 🇹 Finally, we have u/nu/tu for he/she/it, where the n- is from Chinese nǔ "woman", the t- from "it", and the u… not known. 🇹 If I had to guess now, it would be either from the concord u- (which we exclude because back then I only knew the Click Song and nothing about Bantu languages AFAIK), or from Romagnolo "u", which is one form of the "he" clitic subject pronoun. 🇹 The plurals then simply lengthen the vowels of the singulars. Which means completely ignoring vowel quantities when singing is a bit of a bad form, right? 🇹
We are then told that these prefixes «很少地被删除 Hěn shǎo de bèi shānchú», which I'm pretty sure means "are very rarely omitted". 🇹 Which makes the inordinate amount of implied ones in my translation all the more striking :). 🇹
OK, on to the mood suffixes. These have their table in the noteblock, which unfortunately got split between pages in the copied version, so here are four rows of it, then I'll quote the other row. 🇹
As for the infinitive, «Marked with “are”, from the Italian infinitive ending, mood of verbal nouns (like “I like eating” or “Singing is beautiful”». 🇹 Alright, nice. 🇹
The noteblock then pulls out all the other suffixes from its hat: 🇹
Where the hell do these come from? 🇹 Well, this is where I rectify a previous statement. 🇹 See, in 2018, I copied and translated the noteblock. 🇹 However, the noteblock omits the end of the file, only translated within 17/2/21. 🇹 The file, after the mood suffixes, says: 🇹 词典的形式能够被用像除述现在如果在它后有“-n”。 Ṁan óƀ /ʘan o:p̚/ 就是“爱你”。如果有这个“n”， 几永远没有人称的前置代号。Cídiǎn de xíngshì nénggòu bèi yòng xiàng chúshù xiànzài rúguǒ zài tā hòu yǒu “-n”. Ṁan óƀ /ʘan o:p̚/ jiù shì “ài nǐ”. Rúguǒ yǒu zhè ge “n”, jǐ yǒngyuǎn méiyǒu rénchēng de qián zhì dàihào». In other words, «The dictionary form can be used as a "chúshù xiànzài" if there is "-n" after it. Ṁan óƀ /ʘan o:p̚/ means "love you". If there is this "n", there will almost never be a personal prefix». 🇹 What the hell is a chúshù xiànzài? 🇹 From the example, one would deduce "generic present". 🇹 Xiànzài does mean "present", but the other "word" doesn't seem to exist. 🇹 Oh look, the mood suffix table actually uses that term for "indicative", as confirmed by the noteblock's little suffix summary we will see below. 🇹 What happened is, I got one character wrong. The correct term is 陈述 chénshù. OK, so indicative present suffix that allows the omission of everything else but the dictionary form. 🇹
On to the aspects. So. 🇹 Here is what the file gives us: 🇹
I'll go through these with somewhat liberal translations. 🇹
First we have what I call "aorist". 🇹 This is used either for instantaneous (read: quickly occurring) actions, and then it's called "short-time aorist", 🇹 or with recurring actions, and then it's "habitual aorist" (likened to the English "simple aspect", 🇹 or with actions of indefinite time, which I dubbed "indefinite-time aorist", but may rather be called "gnomic aorist", like in proverbs. 🇹 The marker is èks, from what happens to κ γ χ in Ancient Greek sigmatic aorists (e.g. λέγω > ἔλεξα). 🇹
Then we have the progressive aspect, "the aspect of long long actions", which Google wonderfully mistranslates, 🇹 likened to the Chinese aspect marker 着 and the "continuous aspect" of English -ing. 🇹 In fact, the marker of this aspect is precisely a mishmash of those two: 🇹 idje-ing.
Finally, the perfect aspect, for actions done in the past where you can still see the effects in the present. 🇹 Strangely, the marker is English past simple -ed. 🇹 One would expect this to act just like the "perfect" word in English "tenses", but the use I made of it in the translation suggests I may have been confused. 🇹
To conclude the morphology, we have the tense suffixes. 🇹 Three tenses: present, past, and future. 🇹 The present has no suffix. 🇹 The past has -ata, from Japanese past tense -ta. 🇹 The future has -hwei, from Chinese 会. 🇹 If a root ends in -b -d or -g, its future tense will end in -phwei, -thwei, or -khwei, if there is no other suffix in between. 🇹 Before I go into the translation, let me get through the last bit of file, so I can abandon it for good. 🇹
ṁa 是“爱”的词典的形式。从曾被说的，a-ṁa-idjeing-ata 是“我曾爱着”，并需要说多么长的补语。 í-ṁa-èks-if 是“请你们爱”(规劝的虚拟)或“如果你们爱(并那时可能的)”(如果有“如果”在动词前)或“咱们料想你们爱吧(并那是可能的)”(设想的虚拟)。
Ṁa shì “ài” de cídiǎn de xíngshì. Cóng céng bèi shuō de, a-ṁa-idjeing-ata shì “wǒ céng àizhe”, bìng xūyào shuō duōme zhǎng de bǔyǔ. Í-ṁa-èks-if shì “qǐng nǐmen ài” (guīquàn de xūnǐ) huò “rúguǒ nǐmen ài (bìng nà shí kěnéng de)” (rúguǒ yǒu “rúguǒ” zài dòngcí qián) huò “zánmen liàoxiǎng nǐmen ài ba (bìng nà shì kěnéng de)” (shèxiǎng de xūnǐ).
ṁa is the dictionary form of "love". From what has been said, a-ṁa-idjeing-ata is "I was loving", and needs a complement that says for how long. Í-ṁa-èks-if is "Please love ye" (subjunctive of advice [exhortative?]) or "If ye love (and then it is possible)" (if "if" is before the verb) or "We expect y'all to love (and that's possible)" (presumptive subjunctive?). 🇹
So immediately I broke my puzzle with the second form, since aspect is supposed to go after mood. 🇹 So at the very least it should be í-ṁa-if-èks. 🇹 So, I'm assuming we're looking at exhortative subjunctive (easy), 🇹 then the second translation must match the AG ἐάν with subjunctive, 🇹 as distinct from "impossible hypotheses", 🇹 which would presumably use the optative. 🇹 We're pretty scarce on syntax info, btw. 🇹 Next thing to see is the summary of the suffixes in the noteblock: 🇹
With that, we get into the translation. 🇹 The noteblock shows the thought process, essentially, so I want to sort of get back into past me's mind when I made this translation. 🇹 We will go line by line: Chinese, meaning, my misunderstanding, what I translated it as, comments to it (sometimes even changes made by past me). 🇹
First line: 🇹 一开始我以为 Yīkāishǐ wǒ yǐwéi, At the start I thought. 🇹
从相信爱情会有奇迹 Cóng xiāngxìn àiqíng huì yǒu qíjī, I've always believed love would have miracles. 🇹
以为自己不再去想你 Yǐwéi zìjǐ bù zài qù xiǎng nǐ, I think I won't love you / think of you anymore. 🇹
With all of that, the script continues with a table where, on the left, you see the translation as gathered in 2018, in the middle, the translation as I presumably would have had it back in 2012, and on the right, the translation as it should have been back then based on the rules established for the language. 🇹
[Corrections 1:24-1:33 29/11/23.] 🇹 To close off this video, 🇹 I will now sing the English translation and this revised Conlang translation. 🇹 I will eventually be making a video for the song, 🇹 but first I want to give the English translation a rhyming remake, 🇹 and the Conlang one a complete redo, because this one is just garbage, from the perspective of a translation. 🇹 Also, at least l. 2 in the English is still wrong. 🇹
ʃ̶̀ś̶ᛩ͡͞ᛐ- ʃ̶̀ś̶ɹ̃ƨ̶́Cᛩ͡͞ᛐś̶-ƨ̶̤́ᛩ͡͞ᛐ/̴̥0, ǿ̨̱̀̃Ɔ˘ᛩ͡͞ᛐƆ˘-ɹ̃ƨ̶́Cᛩ͡͞ᛐś̶!
/ʃti-ʃtɛs’bit-ɬima/, /eviv-’ɛsbit/!
*Some kind of "Whaaa?" meme.*
Hi everyone! 🇹 And welcome to MickConlangs 🇹. In this video, I will discuss my three attempts at constructing a language during High School. 🇹
A long long time ago, at a time when my diary wasn't yet a thing (gosh this is old!), apparently on 29/7/2008 🇹 (though I have a memory associating this with England, which I came back from within the first 10 days of July at most 🇹), I sat down, created a new Word file, and in it, I came up with a script, and started creating a language. 🇹
But before we get into that, I want to discuss something else. 🇹 This is something even older, which resurfaced from an old notebook as I looked for interesting tidbits for my Operation: megadiary (cfr. my blog's todo list), 🇹 something which, when I saw it staring me down from an old notebook, I went «What the Norse Underworld Goddess is this?». Boy was that creative mincing… but don't worry: the Italian version is even worse :). 🇹 So here are the images of that notebook:🇹
But what in the world is this thing? And what does it have to do with "Lin. A", this undecyphered mysterious script? 🇹 Well, to the latter question, I don't have an answer. I tried to replicate the glyphs with the Linear A characters from Unicode, and they are nowhere to be found. Or at least, the stop symbol isn't. 🇹
Stop symbol? What do I mean? 🇹 Well, I'm guessing I'd just learnt a bunch of phonetic jargon when I came up with this, because it's really a phonetic alphabet. 🇹 More precisely, it is a 1-to-1 mapping of a subset of the IPA onto these weird symbols. 🇹
So. Consonants are described by manner of articulation, place of articulation, and voice. 🇹 Of course, in the real world, there are several more parameters, but this script does not care about that :). 🇹 Each consonant has a base glyph for the manner of articulation, and two superscript glyphs for the other two features. 🇹 Oh, and there's the lateral diacritic too, which, just like the place of articulation diacritics, is very pictographic. 🇹 I mean, most place of articulation diacritics are literal depictions of tongue positions, or lip positions for bilabial and labiodental, and then there's epiglottal and glottal which Idk how I came up with them. 🇹 I mean, just look:
Yo, I even handled coarticulation? I had gone mad with power from the IPA knowledge, I guess :). I mean, having a character in a "tema" (an essay? how do you even translate that?) have two coarticulated consonants in 5 syllables, Angmaihwaglio /aŋ͡maj'h͡waʎo/, is a pretty solid indicator of "mad with power", don't you think :)? 🇹 Anyway, coarticulation was just "add ligature when needed", just like in IPA. 🇹
And now we come to the vowels. Those are described by openness, frontness, and rounding:🇹
So besides the examples in the page itself, I came up with three more: 🇹
[Here I will have the sheet in my hand and comment on the transcriptions, so here's the image of the sheet.]
But let's get back to my first conlang, shall we? 🇹 All I know about it comes from a file that is both created and modified 29/7/2008 12:15. This is bullshit, of course, because there's no way that file took just a minute. I assume the file was downloaded and got the metadata of the downloading time. 🇹 The file just throws the alphabet chart right at us. 🇹 It is so large I can't get a single pic of it, so I will go bit by bit. 🇹 There is basically nothing in the way of where the heck these symbols came from. Like, why does the h-sound /h/ look like butt cheeks "(("? 🇹 There are however a couple clear patterns to this script. Let's start from plosives, fricatives, and affricates:🇹
- The voiceless counterpart of a voiced consonant is obtained by adding a line through, or over, the consonant;🇹
- Fricatives are almost always flipped versions of the correponding stops;🇹
- Affricates are the combination of plosives and fricatives.🇹
As for etymology, well, aside from patterns, let's see. 🇹 The H for dental plosives might be supposed to represent teeth, though that would suggest a bidental sound. 🇹 The theta or theta symbol probably is used because the sound it represents in Greek is precisely a dental fricative. 🇹 The voiced glottal fricative is mapped to "erm", the "Idk what to say next" sound. 🇹 The glottal stop is just an air blockage. 🇹
But that is of course not the full chart. Indeed, we have way more symbols. I won't show you pics though, because the rest of the chart is pretty sparse. 🇹
We have a total of 5 symbols for nasals: /̴̥ or o͊, ᴝ, |ʅ, Δ̤, and Δ̤̀, respectively bilabial, alveolar (also used by assimilation for labiodental and dental), palatal, velar, and uvular. 🇹
But why are there two symbols for some sounds? Well, the file explains that:🇹
«Where there are two symbols for the same sound, it depends on the position of said sound in the word which symbol you use, like the greek sigma (σ, ς).». 🇹
The sounds this applies to are the bilabial nasal (aka M), the alveolar lateral approximant (aka L), the voiceless uvular affricate (aka basically a k + the ch of Bach), and maybe the open back unrounded vowel (aka ah in father), though that one explicitly states «ɑ͞͠ɒ or ɑ͞ɒ, you choose which to use.», as we will see, so maybe the two were supposed to be fully interchangeable. 🇹
We have three trills: bilabial C̤̃, evidently modeled on the voiced plosive, then alveolar ᴝ̇, apparently inspired by the nasal, and uvular Ĩ̸, looking an awful lot like the voiced affricate. 🇹 It is noted that «In intervocalic positions, trills turn to taps. I will indicate them as trills in IPA, but remember to use taps instead.». 🇹
There are six approximants: alveolar ᴝ̇̃, again inspired by the nasal, alveolar lateral l̶ or +, as said above it has two glyphs, then palatal ᛩ͡͡ᛐ, the flipped version ᛇ͡ᚹ which is labio-palatal (as in French "lui"), the palatal lateral \ (Italian gl), and the labio-velar ʌ͡v /w/. Finally, the lateral fricatives are denoted as ƨ̤́ and ƨ̶̤́. 🇹 As for vowels, here is the table: 🇹
«Stress can be marked with bold or with a tilde above. Labiodental plosives are extremely rare and quite hard to pronounce: you can turn them to bilabials with no misunderstandings.», says the file. 🇹
And then the language is introduced: 🇹 «This is a New Language’s own Script. Below you find a grammar of this New Idioma (in that language ermᛩ͡͡ᛐʌ͡v0 ᛩ͡͡ᛐ0Δ̤υ¿0 /'ɦjawa 'jaŋgʕa/). Its name is ᛇ͡ᚹᛩ͡͞ᛐΔ̤υᛩ͡͞ᛐ ᛚ̶̽0ᴝ̇̃ʌ͞vᴝᛩ͡͞ᛐ /ɥiŋgi’ɕaɹuni/ or, anglicized, Wingisharunian. It has also an easier colloquial name: Gungish (υʌ͞vΔ̤υᛩ͡͞ᛐ /’guŋgi/).».
At which point, we go into the grammar, of course. I planned to give it complete grammar, but only got as far as what seems to be a partial conjugation of "to be". 🇹
«The verb “to be” is the only Gungish irregular verb. Its irregularity is given by its three different verbal stems (ʃ̶̀ś̶ʌ͞vϋ̶̤ - /ʃtuk/, ɹ̃ƨ̶́Cᛩ͡͞ᛐś̶, /ɛsbit/, ǿ̨̱̀̃ Ĩ̸ƨ̶́ś̶0ᴝ̇, /eʀstar/) that mix together in some tenses. The first stem comes from estou (pronounced /ʃtu/), portuguese for I was, the second one is from es(se), latin for to be and be /bi/, and the third one’s from ê(t)r(e) and (es)tar, respectively French and Spanish for to be. Here is its complete conjugation». 🇹 Looks like my Portuguese was real shaky, since "estou" neither is pronounced that way (it's /ʃtou) nor means "I was" (it means "I am"). 🇹 I wonder if I would ever have come up with an explanation for the stem mixing. 🇹 Here is the conjugation table: 🇹
We do have one more sentence from the file: «For the continuous tenses, you add a special augment at the beginning, which is |ʅᛩ͡͞ᛐ /ɲi/. It comes from the English suffix –ing written right to left (gni–) and pronounced in an Italian way (gn in Italian is pronounced ɲ).». OK, two sentences I guess :). 🇹
Why do I say this isn't a complete conjugation? Because how are you going to render "past continuous" or "pluperfect" or such? You have a full set of present tenses (no participles gerunds or infinitives, but you can definitely do without those), but then the perfect only has the indicative: that is not enough! 🇹
Then again, I can definitely come up with all the remaining perfect moods in a way that might have been my idea back then. 🇹 Indeed, if you look at present, you see stem + suffixes. 🇹 Going to subjunctive, you just change the suffix's vowel to -e- (or -in for the first-person singular). 🇹 Then for the conditional you add in the morpheme -jere- plus the final consonant of the indicative, contracting the third-person plural from -jerestsin to -jestsin. 🇹 The imperative has its set of prefixes which tack on to the stem. 🇹 The 2p and 3p prefixes are the corresponding subjunctive suffixes, the 2s one is the indicative suffix, the 1p one is a slight variation of the subjunctive one, the 1s one is a variation of the indicative one, and the 3s one is a blend of conditional and indicative. 🇹 Applying similar changes, and deciding to make some sort of vowel harmony in conditional perfect with all the -jere turning some final vowels to -e, we get the following: 🇹
What is clear is that any other verb would have used the same suffix set and reduplication rule, but with its own stem. 🇹 I have mentally created the conjugation for "to study" with the root stud-, but I will not create a full conjugation table. 🇹
As a closing remark before the next Conlang, note how I was inconsistent in the positional use of the two glyphs for /m/, using õ as both medial and final. 🇹 Or maybe the intention was to distinguish syllable-final and otherwise, and thus the ɥam-ɛsbit is correctly spelled with the final m? 🇹 Instructions unclear, or inconsistent, and besides, is that really the syllabification of that form? 🇹 Anyway, that's it for Wingisharunian. 🇹
And did I mention I actually tried to figure out how to design a font that would convert regular letters into this weird script, like Symbol converts them into Greek letters? Well, now I have :). 🇹
🎵F̮o|̊🌳 wŏ↓̨̆ᛉO·↓o wŏ↑̨ᛉO·↑ 🌳|̊C↑† ⃓-ˡ↓🌳 --𐇽̈o|̊🎵
🎵Wíla fĭę́rdei fĭų́rdu álþux neañíl🎵
OMG what a nightmare it is to type those glyphs… does anyone know that tune? It just popped into my mind some time ago, and Idk where it is from… Zoey's extraordinary playlist, maybe? 🇹
Anyway, as you can see, the script changed, so this must be a new conlang of mine. 🇹 The script was invented during Latin class on 16/1/2009. Here is the glyph table in my diary: 🇹
Anyway, let us list the glyphs, and explain their etymologies, which are much better documented this time: 🇹
- 🌳 A/a /a/, stylysed tree, from Italian albero;
- ~ Ḃ/ḃ /ʙ/, unknown etymology;
- Ū M/m /m/, represents a mouth;
- α| B/b /b/, from a stylyzed fish meant to represent a whale (Italian balena;
- s Ɛ/ɛ /ɛ/, the name of that Latin letter is ess;
- 🎩 Æ/æ /æ/, that is a hat;
- ʟ̑ P/p /p/, stylyzed umbrella, in French parapluie;
- Ȗ Pf/pf /pf/, from a mix of ʟ̑ /p/ and w /f/; I guess I was picking up that pattern from the previous script again :)?
- C Þ/þ /θ/, from a hand with its thumb stretched out lefwards;
- þ Ð/ð /ð/, English thorn (þ); a bit of an abuse since that letter typically represents the previous sound, but maybe finding an easily representable word with a /ð/ was turning out hard for me back then; not like I have much of an idea now either…;
- † X/x /χ/, from the modern Greek pronunciation of the chi in Χριστός;
- ∇ K/k /k/, stylyzed carrot;
- o I/i /i/, a ball, Latin pīla;
- ö̤ Ë/ë /ǝ/, presumably because schwa reminded me of German ö /ø/? I mean, I did write ööö for uuuh for a very long time in Uni…;
- ↓̊ E/e /e/, from "he/she/it fell", Latin cecĭdit, and if you read cècidit, well, your friggin' business :);
- w F/f /f/, from a stylyzed p*ssy, Italian figa;
- ◉ V/v /v/ from vedere, Italian for "to see", an action I represented with an eye;
- |̊ L/l /l/, stylyzed man representing a lone person;
- F̮ W/w /w/, from ancient Greek digamma which was thus pronounced;
- ガ G/g /g/, in Katakana that's pronounced "ga";
- ٭ /s/, a star;
- Ц⃥̄ C/c /ts/, mix of /t/ and /s/, presumo;
- O·(ơ/Ơ) D/d /d/ (alveolar), from a stylyzed door; has the alternate form Ơ; I assume those two were meant to be precisely interchangeable?
- Ц T/t /t/ (alveolar), from a tooth;
- --𐇽̈ Ñ/ñ /ɲ/, unknown etymology, graphically it seems to have been meant as a sideways r with a diaeresis on top, and I cannot input a sideways r, but with a sideways n it would look like this: ᴝ̈;
- △ O/o /o/, from a roof, Italian tetto;
- ʌ Y/y /y/, unknown etymology;
- ↑ U/u /u/, unknown etymology, possibly stealing the "u" in "up" and pronouncing it as an Italian U;
- ♡ H/h /h/, a heart;
- s Hh/hh /ɦ/, the sound is seen as similar to a sigh;
- Ø· / Ơ̷ Dz/dz /dz/, mix of /d/ above and /z/ below, with alternate form;
- ⃓-ˡ N/n /n/ or allophonically /ɱ/ (alveolar and labiodental), from a stylyzed nose;
- |̱̄|=| Ř/ř /ɹ/, from row, I believe meant as the action of rowing, so this would be an oar; otherwise from a row of e.g. chairs I do not see how to get this form;
- o̩̍ J/j /ʒ/, from a sun representing the day, French jour;
- -+ Š/š /ʃ/, from a stylyzed swordfish, which btw first reduced to a sword and then got stylyzed;
- z Z/z /z/, stolen straight from English zed or zee;
- Y⃥ / ᛉ R/r /r/, from a branch, Italian ramo; two forms, I presume interchangeable;
- Ц̵ Č/č /tʃ/, mix of /t/ and /ʃ/;
- Ợ̍ Dž/dž /dʒ/, mix of /d/ and /ʒ/;
- ⨁ Ɔ/ɔ /ɔ/, the diary explains the etymology as «allora alla terona», so it's /ɔ/ as the o in allora (then) is pronounced in the south of Italy (not in the north, surely not by me or anyone in my family), but the hell does that sign have to do with "then"?
- ☞ Ng/ng /ŋ/, unknown etymology, but it seems from the drawing it was meant to be a hand with an open finger and the the other fingers closed, like I reproduced it here, so perhaps from finger;
- X ʔ /ʔ/, from the idea of blocking the airflow in the throat; looks like I recycled that idea from the previous script :).
The first inflection table is for wila, stem wil-, from English "whale" /weil/ mangled into /wi:/ (basically "wheel"). 🇹
But wait a second. 🇹 The diary, before giving it, states that genitive singular ends in -y for masculine and -ë for neuter, and that those thematic vowels (-a and -e) become -i/-e for masculine and -u/-y for neuter. 🇹 Well actually the -y part is inferred from the table, it is not marked in the diary before giving examples. 🇹 By the way, did I mention that all of this is written into the Latin diary I had basically just started keeping at that point in time? 🇹 Anyway, the masculine example is neañí, "young man", from Greek νεανίας. 🇹
To complete the translation, we advance by one day, to 23/1/2009, where, after completing a translation test for Latin, I sit in class and come up with the second declension. 🇹 Here is the suffix table for masculine: 🇹
We are then told feminine is the same as masculine, and given the following neuter ending table: 🇹
But it does not end here, because some nouns have ablaut. 🇹 In other words, some nouns will have a vowel in the stem changing throughout the inflection, and that vowel will always be marked with an ogonek. 🇹 There is a table of these ablaut changes, but let me just skip to the example, namely fĭord- "fĭord", masculine. 🇹
The diary of 24/1/2009 mentions "a bit of Gungish" (un po' di Gunghese). 🇹 It's not clear if I made something more for this language, which then got lost, 🇹 or if I reviewed it, or if I went back to the older Gungish from above, perhaps expanding on it, 🇹 or just reviewing it for whatever reason. 🇹 Whatever the case, this will probably stay a mystery forever, because nothing more is said about it either in the handwritten diary or in the copied version. 🇹
We then skip to 27/1/2009 for declension 3, here is the suffix table. 🇹 Curiously, it only has the singular. 🇹
The last bit of this Conlang was made on 30/1/2009, during, once again, Latin class. 🇹 Suddenly we have plural suffixes, and a couple full declension tables. 🇹 The first one is for mænɔ "man", from "man" of course. 🇹
And the same is true of the other example, truks, from French trousse "pencil case", thus probably meaning that. 🇹
And with that, the last thing from that day, and the last in general since it doesn't seem I ever came back to this conlang, is the rules for assimlation, which I will just let you check out for a while. 🇹
🎵Dzã ṁaẏal de ĺarèkxe óṅń🎵
What was that? 🇹 Heĺno/vľna lä/gū. 🇹 Which is just what I came up with for "new language" in this thing, on 6/11/23. 🇹 Heĺ-…-na, as we shall see, is basically inflection. 🇹 The root no/vľ "new" comes from "novella" in Italian. 🇹 As for lä/gū, that's the sum of French "langue" and Chinese yǔ, both meaning "language". 🇹 But honestly, if you'd asked me in 2012 when I created this thing, I would have replied in Chinese: 🇹 xīn de yǔ. Or maybe in English: 🇹 New Language. I mean, after all, the file I have about it is called 🇹 New Language - 新的语.
But back to that line: what is it? 🇹 It's supposed to translate line 1 of 🇹 Shôjo no koro ni modotta mitai ni, this beautiful Japanese song I badly mistranslated into a bunch of languages. 🇹 Good thing I never went further with this translation, 🇹 because the Chinese-Conlang translation we will be analyzing is just… 🇹 But what are those words? 🇹 Well, Dzã means "in/at/on", or something like that, from Chinese zài /dzaj/ shortened to just /dza/ and then nasalised. 🇹 Actually, the long vowel may mean I was thinking of how "I" is pronounced /a:/ in some English dialects. 🇹 Ṁaỵal means "dream". 🇹 In fact, presumably "the dream", since -l is the article (as we shall see). 🇹 De is the easiest, it's just Spanish for "of". 🇹 Ĺarèkxe is a mangling of Italian "parecchie", "many, several". 🇹 Óṅń means "time(s)" (by the way, that should be óṅńs, I guess), from Romanian "odată", where I truncated -ată, click-ified the -d-, and threw in a syllabic nasal for good measure. 🇹
With that out of the way, it's time for a phonetic chart of this thing, which uses an adaptation of the Latin alphabet (no new script this time, luckily). 🇹
As for the vowels, we have a lot of variables: 🇹 10 qualities plus 5 syllabic consonants, 🇹 then length (long or short) and nasality (oral or nasal). 🇹 Oral short vowels are called "ordinary" :). 🇹 Finally, the stress is marked with a / after the stressed syllable. 🇹 Or, «重音的符号是在重音的音节后的“/”。» (/ is 斜线号 xiéxiànhào). 🇹 OK, I'mma stop with the Chinese :).🇹
We start out simple: one definite article -l, or -ul for euphony (because having a syllabic l for the article was too much :) ), like the Romanian article. 🇹 Then we have the indefinite article ka, from the Chinese classifier gè, which also serves as a partitive article with plurals, and even as a generic classifier. 🇹 Yes, there are classifiers. 🇹 Only two though: the generic one, which is completely optional, 🇹 and the one for «things always in pairs», rightfully a mangling of Chinese shuāng, which I turned into sṅong. 🇹 Influence from some Chinese dialect in that vowel? Maybe. 🇹
Noun inflection? Nope! No declension, no gender. Just the plural suffix -s, which as we have seen I wasn't too consistent on using. 🇹 Becomes -z when after a voiced consonant (wonder what happens with a vowel… guess -z still?), article goes before it. 🇹 So ṁaẏa, ṁaẏal, ṁaẏaz, ṁaẏalz, for dream the dream dreams the dreams. 🇹
Adjectives are where things start to get interesting. 🇹 Two classes: nominal adjectives and verbal adjectives. 🇹 I had "just" studied Japanese about a year prior, as it turns out :). 🇹 Nominal adjectives are uninflected, except for the plural -s. 🇹 So "several times" should be ĺarè/kxez óṅńz. 🇹 Verbal adjectives are basically verbs, and conjugate fully just like verbs. 🇹 If you want to use them adjectivally, you need to surround them with that heĺ-…-na from before. 🇹 The prefix heĺ- is from "rel(ative)", since a verb modifying a noun would be a relative clause, 🇹 while the suffix -na is another Japanism, from the -na of "Japanese adjectives". 🇹 Not sure if I was taking the -na of nominal adjectives, or the -na you can tack onto verbal ones like chiisai -> chiisana. 🇹 With that "rel", I may have been thinking of how Indonesian uses plain relative "yang" before many adjectives, or even of how the Chinese particle "de" can be both a relative clause marker and an adjective marker. 🇹
Verbs, however, are the big part of the morphology. 🇹 Verb forms are created by a simple "puzzle": 🇹 «Personal prefix + verb root (or “dictionary form”) + mood suffix (Indicative, Subjunctive, Optative, Imperative, Infinitive) + aspect suffix (aoristic or simple, progressive, perfective) + tense suffix (present, past, future)». 🇹 So apparently everything is perfectly regular and logical. 🇹 Except then I provided examples of these suffixes being "elided" in several ways, or being sort of contracted together, but we'll get there with the translation. 🇹 Looks like I originally thought of having tense before aspect, and then wrote an arrow to swap them. 🇹
So… what the hell are these personal prefixes? 🇹 Well, my model was almost surely Romagnolo… where there are clitic subject pronouns just like in French, except for whatever reason I analysed them as part of the conjugation. 🇹 I doubt I had the influence of Bantu languages back then, where I'd have seen concords and gone: "Look! Just like Romagnolo!". 🇹 Anyway, here is the table of these "prefixes": 🇹
We are then told that these prefixes «很少地被删除 Hěn shǎo de bèi shānchú», which I'm pretty sure means "are very rarely omitted". 🇹 Which makes the inordinate amount of implied ones in my translation all the more striking :). 🇹
OK, on to the mood suffixes. These have their table in the noteblock, which unfortunately got split between pages in the copied version, so here are four rows of it, then I'll quote the other row. 🇹
The noteblock then pulls out all the other suffixes from its hat: 🇹
On to the aspects. So. 🇹 Here is what the file gives us: 🇹
First we have what I call "aorist". 🇹 This is used either for instantaneous (read: quickly occurring) actions, and then it's called "short-time aorist", 🇹 or with recurring actions, and then it's "habitual aorist" (likened to the English "simple aspect", 🇹 or with actions of indefinite time, which I dubbed "indefinite-time aorist", but may rather be called "gnomic aorist", like in proverbs. 🇹 The marker is èks, from what happens to κ γ χ in Ancient Greek sigmatic aorists (e.g. λέγω > ἔλεξα). 🇹
Then we have the progressive aspect, "the aspect of long long actions", which Google wonderfully mistranslates, 🇹 likened to the Chinese aspect marker 着 and the "continuous aspect" of English -ing. 🇹 In fact, the marker of this aspect is precisely a mishmash of those two: 🇹 idje-ing.
Finally, the perfect aspect, for actions done in the past where you can still see the effects in the present. 🇹 Strangely, the marker is English past simple -ed. 🇹 One would expect this to act just like the "perfect" word in English "tenses", but the use I made of it in the translation suggests I may have been confused. 🇹
To conclude the morphology, we have the tense suffixes. 🇹 Three tenses: present, past, and future. 🇹 The present has no suffix. 🇹 The past has -ata, from Japanese past tense -ta. 🇹 The future has -hwei, from Chinese 会. 🇹 If a root ends in -b -d or -g, its future tense will end in -phwei, -thwei, or -khwei, if there is no other suffix in between. 🇹 Before I go into the translation, let me get through the last bit of file, so I can abandon it for good. 🇹
ṁa 是“爱”的词典的形式。从曾被说的，a-ṁa-idjeing-ata 是“我曾爱着”，并需要说多么长的补语。 í-ṁa-èks-if 是“请你们爱”(规劝的虚拟)或“如果你们爱(并那时可能的)”(如果有“如果”在动词前)或“咱们料想你们爱吧(并那是可能的)”(设想的虚拟)。
Ṁa shì “ài” de cídiǎn de xíngshì. Cóng céng bèi shuō de, a-ṁa-idjeing-ata shì “wǒ céng àizhe”, bìng xūyào shuō duōme zhǎng de bǔyǔ. Í-ṁa-èks-if shì “qǐng nǐmen ài” (guīquàn de xūnǐ) huò “rúguǒ nǐmen ài (bìng nà shí kěnéng de)” (rúguǒ yǒu “rúguǒ” zài dòngcí qián) huò “zánmen liàoxiǎng nǐmen ài ba (bìng nà shì kěnéng de)” (shèxiǎng de xūnǐ).
ṁa is the dictionary form of "love". From what has been said, a-ṁa-idjeing-ata is "I was loving", and needs a complement that says for how long. Í-ṁa-èks-if is "Please love ye" (subjunctive of advice [exhortative?]) or "If ye love (and then it is possible)" (if "if" is before the verb) or "We expect y'all to love (and that's possible)" (presumptive subjunctive?). 🇹
So immediately I broke my puzzle with the second form, since aspect is supposed to go after mood. 🇹 So at the very least it should be í-ṁa-if-èks. 🇹 So, I'm assuming we're looking at exhortative subjunctive (easy), 🇹 then the second translation must match the AG ἐάν with subjunctive, 🇹 as distinct from "impossible hypotheses", 🇹 which would presumably use the optative. 🇹 We're pretty scarce on syntax info, btw. 🇹 Next thing to see is the summary of the suffixes in the noteblock: 🇹
First line: 🇹 一开始我以为 Yīkāishǐ wǒ yǐwéi, At the start I thought. 🇹
- I guess I'm at the end of the line in recalling it, so I start from the verb: think. 🇹 Well, thinking is done with the mind, so we pronounce that in a weird way /ma:nd/, drop the d, and turn the n into nasality: mã. 🇹
- OK, back to the start: I need "at". Let's just take Chinese zài, at/in/on, and clip it to dza, and why not, slap on some nasality: dzã. 🇹 Oh yeah, did I mention we're making it long? 🇹
- Alright, "start" as a noun. 🇹 Let's just ruthlessly mangle the Chinese kāishǐ into kheħẏí: we need to use clicks, after all. Those in that initial line weren't nearly enough :). 🇹
- So… Dzã kheħẏí amä'kstá. Oh right, did I mention that aoristic suffix eks can be elided? 🇹
- Also, am I confusing the length marks of the script with the stress mark of Spanish? 🇹 Or did I just make the past suffix long? 🇹
- And why am I using regular past? 🇹 Like, this is an imperfect, don't you think? 🇹 I must be thinking in English, where I'd use the past simple. 🇹 Or was I going habitual here? 🇹 I guess so. 🇹
- But I did forget to put in the article, didn't I? 🇹 Oh wait, Italian doesn't put it in in the phrase "in principio", so maybe I had that in mind and transplanted it into this Conlang. 🇹 Makes sense, right? 🇹
- Um, yeah, I need "love". 🇹 Perfect word to use a bilabial click in, right? 🇹 That is a kissing sound, and love and kisses go hand in hand! 🇹 So let's make that ṁas… and forget about the -s when writing out the finished line. 🇹 Because who wants that -s anyway? 🇹 It only messes up the plural! 🇹 Plus, I made ṁan óƀ already, 🇹 so either I decide -sn simplifies to -n without compensatory lengthening, 🇹 or I drop that pesky s. 🇹
- "Originally". Hmm. Well, běn means "origin", so… bũ be it! 🇹
- Then I have "easy", skipping "very" just because maybe I'll leave it implied, depends on how the musicality goes. 🇹 I'll make that a verbal adjective, and the root will be fag, as inspired by French facile / Italian facile / Latin facile. 🇹 Actually no, it will be fa, but I won't realize till I'm making the table at the bottom of the script :). 🇹 Actually, I can't tell. 🇹 So, I clearly started with fak, then wrote a g over it, then it seems I strikeouted the tail for whatever reason. 🇹 Why not the middle? Was I under the impression that strikeouted g meant something in the script? 🇹 I'll assume not. 🇹 In effect, the line summary in the noteblock shows a deleted tail strikeout. 🇹 So… I guess I wanted fag? 🇹
- So I need a past tense, plus subjunctive for doubtfulness after verbs of opinion (more on that later), so fagif'ksata. 🇹 At least I was consistent in stressing the -ta :). 🇹
- But now I'm missing a syllable, so I need a one-syllable "very". 🇹 Well, French just so happens to have it in "tres", so I'll just import it: trĕ, open vowel, make it long just because. 🇹
- And then as I said I forget an s, so the line is Ṁa bũ trě fagif'ksata. 🇹 Where is that dang personal prefix though? 🇹
- OK, "so, therefore"… let's take Japanese dakara and contract it to dakra. 🇹 And stress it on the final syllable so it fits the tune. 🇹
- We may need a negation here, so let's establish the negative prefix n-, from Romanian n- (which is "nu" contracted with verbs starting with vowels). 🇹 And never ever say if it goes before or after personal prefixes, since we seem to have forgotten about those. 🇹
- "Never", hmm… well, let's take zàiyè bù from Chinese, meaning "never", or "for never more" if you will, and clip it to dzaye/b. 🇹 Oh look! I've remembered my stress mark! 🇹
- So Dakra/ dzaye/b… hmm, "let go"? 🇹 I'll just come up with fä here, no explanation. 🇹 Grr. Well, I guess it could be from Chinese fāchū "send out"? 🇹
- And "you"? Well, I did make ṁan óƀ, so óƀ it must be for consistency. 🇹 Hence, 🇹 Dakra/ dzaye/b fä'ksa/ta óƀ.
- And once again, habitual aorist, I suppose? 🇹
- OK, so "but". 🇹 Let's take it from Latin: sed. 🇹
- Heart. Hmm. Well, this is another word related to love and kisses, so let's put in a bilabial click. 🇹 The rest, we will take from Chinese xīn "heart". 🇹 So ṁin it is. 🇹
- "Put" is fàng in Chinese, so let's make it fang in this language. 🇹
- So "Sed fang'ksat' óƀ dzã ṁin".
- But this means that, in the tune, dzã becomes short and ṁin becomes long, so we are completely ignoring vowel lengths. 🇹 Which means we lose the singular/plural distinction in "personal prefixes". 🇹
- Also, now we can elide the -ta instead of the -at-? 🇹 Wasn't that supposed to be stressed? 🇹
- "Know" is going to be "sap", from Italian "sapere". 🇹 So of course, asapèks, stressed on the è. 🇹
- In the end, hmm… endlich in German… I know! dliś! 🇹 I mean, we don't have the ich-Laut in this language, so ś is the best approximation :). 🇹
- on some day, dzã ka… júx, from French jour. 🇹 Did I make that long for musical reasons? 🇹 Who knows… 🇹
- So Asapè/ks dliś dzã ka júx.
- Let's start with "i ye u". Just because. No explanation, it's obvious, right? 🇹
- No, past me, it's not. 🇹 But maybe it's just the personal prefixes, with "ye" in the middle from Chinese yě "also"? 🇹 Yeah, that makes sense: now the personal prefixes are just subject pronouns. 🇹 And apparently we have distinct object pronouns, since óƀ is a thing. 🇹 Surprise! 🇹
- Let's make that simpler: "you and him will be together". 🇹 So we just make a verbal adjective out of "together", with root itś from Chinese yīqǐ "together". 🇹
- So we presumably want a future, right? 🇹 Indicative, future, 2pl, simple… í-itś-hwei. 🇹 And we immediately delete the prefix, because we're omitting them all, or almost, in this translation. 🇹 So much for "very rarely omitted". 🇹
- But then we are missing a syllable. 🇹 Well, this is a certainty, right? 🇹 So just slap a "certainly" of sorts in there. 🇹 Why not the Japanese exclamative particle "yo", right before the verbal adjective we just inflected? 🇹
- I ye u yo itśèkshwei. But of course I had to forget that it's èks, not eks. 🇹
- Speaking of cái, we can just draw "can" from it, which will be tsa. 🇹
- We'll be using that -n suffix from before, so "tsan", and no personal prefix. 🇹
- For "find out", we take fāxiàn and clip it to faś. 🇹
- We obviously want an infinitive, so faśare. 🇹 And for musical reasons, we decide that, at least in this case, the -are suffix doesn't get stress: fa/śare. 🇹
- ṁa for love, bũ for originally… we need two syllables, so we can just add a "that", which up till now we have never used. 🇹 I guess it's like English, where "that" is optional and tends to be omitted (except for some relative circumstances). 🇹
- For "that", we take ὡς from AG, mangle it to òx, and tack "che" from Italian onto it: 🇹 òxke.
- So Tsan fa/śare òxke/ ṁa bũ.
- Sincere is djinsi/, which is traced to a mix of Chinese zhēnxīn and English sincere. 🇹 I suppose the consonants are more or less from Chinese, while the vowels are from English. 🇹
- The root for "to be" will be è, from Gungish esbit. 🇹 No, not from Italian è, but from my first conlang's esbit root. 🇹 Cool throwback! 🇹
- We reexhumate the negative n- and make up n-è'ks'ta. 🇹 I guess we are really overusing the habitual aorist to render every single past simple we use in English, right? 🇹 Also, no personal prefix. 🇹 These are starting to feel more and more like pronouns. 🇹 Which I never gave to this language anyway. 🇹
- We already created a "therefore" in that dakra/, but here we want a single syllable, so let's import jiù from Chinese, as dju. 🇹
- And then for "can" we just create the root pò from Italian "potere". 🇹 I guess pò was meant as "to be allowed to" while tsa was "to have the possibility to"? 🇹
- So djinsi/ n-è'ks'ta dju i-pò'ks.
- "Move" will be "gan", from Chinese gǎndòng. 🇹 Not sure if "move" physically, "move" psychologically, or both. 🇹
- "Sky" is tĩ, from Min Nan thinn "sky". 🇹
- "Earth" is těx from French terre, with a long vowel because why not. 🇹
- So aganèks tĩ ganèks těx.
- "But" is "Sed", remember? 🇹
- We also had "tsa" for "can", so nu-tsan, with the negative n- turned nu-, and the -n for the present indicative, all naturally without explanation. 🇹
- The rest writes itself: Sed nu-tsan gana/re óƀ. 🇹 Oh. We just stressed an -are. Well, whatever :). 🇹
- So, "very well" will just be "ben ben", where "ben" means "well" from Italian. 🇹
- We already have all the tools to form sapèks "[I] know". 🇹
- Let's take "frut" from "fruit" or "frutto" as the root of "to bear fruit". 🇹 Then the form we need is… áfrutèkshwei? 🇹 Yeah, why did I strike out the -nu- in ánufrutèkshwei, which was presumably the negative n-, finally between a personal prefix and a root? 🇹 I'm gonna guess I just wanted to strike the -u-, so ánfrutèkshwei. 🇹
- Thus, Ben ben sapèks ánfrutèkshwei.
- But, Sed. Love, Ṁa. Still… etś, from AG ἔτι. 🇹
- Hesitate… root esit, from esitare in Italian. 🇹 Or at least, that's what I guess now. No explanation is given for this root. Just the full inflected verb form. 🇹
- Which is u-nesitdjeing, btw, so we see once again the n- after the prefix, and we finally see a progressive aspect.
从相信爱情会有奇迹 Cóng xiāngxìn àiqíng huì yǒu qíjī, I've always believed love would have miracles. 🇹
- For "always", we steal "cóng" from Chinese. It's literally "from, since", but can also mean "from the beginning of time". 🇹 We'll make it thö. 🇹
- We can already form mãdjeing'ta for "I was thinking", so we can use that here. 🇹 Oh so now no habitual here? 🇹 Also, isn't this perfective, with that English present perfect? 🇹 I guess using the perfective here would convey disillusionment, 🇹 but still, it would seem like the same as that amã'ks'ta, doesn't it? 🇹 Also, wait a second: that was supposed to be -idjeing, not -djeing! 🇹 Another elision rule? 🇹
- Imply "that", put in ṁa for "love"… nw-agifhwei! 🇹 Wait, what's that? Nothing, it just sprung to mind. 🇹 ut then again, it could be nu-ag-if-hwei, so subjunctive future with feminine personal prefix. 🇹
- Feminine? But the line before you just made ṁa masculine with u-nesitdjeing! 🇹 Which also had the wrong progressive marker without the initial -i-… 🇹 So I guess we should always make it neuter, as inanimate: tw-agifhwei, and tu-nesit'djeing. 🇹
- Miracle… á. 🇹 Yeah, from the interjection "ah". 🇹 Wait though, that leaves it equal to the interjection… better tack on a -l: ál. 🇹 So how are you going to make that definite? áll? áľ, maybe? 🇹
- So I guess Thö mã'djeing'ta ṁa nw-agifhwei ál. But why not álz, plural? 🇹
- But, Sed. Just/Only, dji, from Chinese zhǐ. 🇹
- For "cheat", we steal the English word, and spin it a bit: tcít. 🇹
- Myself? Ma'n! 🇹 Ma, from English "me", plus -n, for -self. 🇹 Actually, it's -un, shortened to -n. 🇹
- So Sed dji atcít'djeing'ks'ta ma'n!
以为自己不再去想你 Yǐwéi zìjǐ bù zài qù xiǎng nǐ, I think I won't love you / think of you anymore. 🇹
- Amãèks we can already form, we imply òxke for the moment, "you" is óƀ, 🇹
- "I won't want … again" (because of course I'm reading "want", that's what xiǎng means, right?)… 🇹 n-arevolyèkshwei, with re- presumably from re-/ri- the Italian prefix for "again", 🇹 and voly the root for "want" or "love" which is from Italian "voglio", "I want". 🇹
- Wait, so now the negative is before the personal prefix? 🇹 Apparently so… are both positions allowed, or am I just not clear on what I want this thing to do? 🇹 Who knows… 🇹
- Anyway, Amãèks n-arevolyèkshwei óƀ.
- So immediately I need "stay". 🇹 For that, I'll look at liúliàn, which in Min is liu-luan, and make it "riu", since in Min Nan l and d and r are all allophones. 🇹
- So Ariuèkshwei, which we can form, and then we shall have dzã "at", of course. 🇹
- Then we need "hurt". We'll make it "pé", from "pain" with some kind of accent. 🇹
- For "distance", we give fámŕ, the first example of bilabial trill, which is, of course, from English "far:. 🇹
- So… Ariuèkshwei dzã nupéna fámŕ. Wait, what the heck is that nupéna? 🇹 The noteblock says nothing more. 🇹 As far as I can tell, we have the negative nu-, 🇹 then pé, which apparently was meant to be an adjective, 🇹 and then the -na, which is why I say "adjective". 🇹 So… am I saying that the negative nu- replaces the heĺ- which is supposed to go with the -na? 🇹 I will have to guess so, and also that nu- is an alternative negative prefix to n-, presumably for euphony. 🇹
- So we need "though", and we will take Middle English "thogh" and have ṯòx in this language. 🇹
- For already, we mix Italian già and Latin iam to form djam. 🇹
- For "forget", we use the Chinese wàng, and mangle it to wńg. 🇹
- So… awńgèksata? Well, yes, but actually definitely not. 🇹 In this context, we definitely have nothing habitual, or instantaneous, or gnomic, 🇹 so we definitely want present perfect awńged. 🇹
- And myself is ma'n, right? No, it's maʔun, because I don't even remember how I spell that sound in the script. 🇹 So actually, maħun. With the stress on the u, of course. 🇹
- So Ṯòx djam awńgèksata maħun.
- For "still", we take Italian "ancora", same meaning, and cut it down to ä/kor. 🇹
- For "want", well, we completely forget about voly, and invent a new verb root śä, from Chinese xiǎng. 🇹
- Alright, for "have" we already have ag. 🇹
- For "news", we mangle the English word into nyúzi. Yes, with /y:/. So I misspelled, and this should be nyūzi 🇹
- For "from", we actually go the Italian route, probably, and translate "of" to "de", Spanish/Italian I guess. 🇹
- And for "you", we forget we had óƀ and i, and use "ti" instead, so we get the nice Spanish "de ti". 🇹
- So Ãk'r aśäèks agare nyūzi de ti. 🇹
With all of that, the script continues with a table where, on the left, you see the translation as gathered in 2018, in the middle, the translation as I presumably would have had it back in 2012, and on the right, the translation as it should have been back then based on the rules established for the language. 🇹
Dzã kheħẏí a-mä’kstá Ṁa bũ trě fag̵if’ksata Dakra/ dzaye/b fä’ksa/ta óƀ Se fang’ksat’ óƀ dzã ṁin Asapèks dliś dzã ka júx İyeu yo itśekshwei Tsan fa/śare òxhe ṁa bũ Djinsi/ n-è’ks’ta dju i-pò’ks Aga/nèks ti ga/nèks těx Sed nu-tsan gana/re óƀ Ben ben sapèks ánufrutèkshwei Sed ṁa etś u-nesitdjeing Aga/nèks ti ga/nèks těx Sed nu-tsan gana/re óƀ Thö mädjeing’ta ṁa nw-agifhwei ál Sed dji atcítdjeing’ks’ta ma’n Amãèks n-arevolyèkshwei óƀ Ariuèkshwei dzã nupéna fámŕ Ṯòx djam awńgèksata maʔun Äk’r aśäèks agare nyūzi de ti |
Dzã kheħẏí/ a-mä’kstá/ Òxke/ ṁa bũ trě fagè/ks Dakra/ dzaye/b fä’ksa/ta óƀ Se fang/’ksat’ óƀ dzã ṁin Asapèks/ dliś dzã ka júx I ye u yo itśekshwei/ Tsan fa/śare òxke/ ṁa bũ Djinsi/ n-è/’ks’ta dju i-pò/’ks Aga/nèks tĩ ga/nèks těx Sed nu-tsa/n gana/re óƀ Ben ben sapè/ks ánfru/tèkshwei Sed ṁa etś u-nesitdje/ing Aga/nèks tĩ ga/nèks těx Sed nu-tsa/n gana/re óƀ Thö mädje/ing’ta ṁa nw-agif/hwei ál Sed dji atcítdje/ing’ks’ta ma’n Amãè/ks n-arevolyè/kshwei óƀ Ariuè/kshwei dzã nupé/na fámŕ Ṯòx djam awńgèksata/ maħu/n Äk’r aśä/èks aga/re nyū/zi de ti |
Dzã kheħẏí/ a-mä’kstá/ Òxke/ ṁa bũ trě fagè/ks Dakra/ dzaye/b afä/ed óƀ Sed fa/nged óƀ dzã ṁin Asapèks/ dliś dzã ka júx I ye u í-itśekshwei/ Tsan fa/śare òxke/ ṁa bũ Djinsi/ n-è/ed dju i-pò/’ks Aga/nèks tĩl ga/nèks těxl Sed antsa/n gana/re óƀ Ben ben sapè/ks ánfru/tèkshwei Sed ṁa etś u-nesitdje/ing Aga/nèks tĩl ga/nèks těxl Sed antsa/n gana/re óƀ Thö amä/ed ṁa u-a/khwei álz Sed dji atcít'dje/ing’ks’ta ma’n Amãè/ks n-areśäè/kshwei óƀ Ariuè/kshwei dzã nupé/na fámŕ Ṯòx djam awńgèksata/ maħu/n Äk’r aśä/èks aga/re nyū/zi de óƀ |
[Corrections 1:24-1:33 29/11/23.] 🇹 To close off this video, 🇹 I will now sing the English translation and this revised Conlang translation. 🇹 I will eventually be making a video for the song, 🇹 but first I want to give the English translation a rhyming remake, 🇹 and the Conlang one a complete redo, because this one is just garbage, from the perspective of a translation. 🇹 Also, at least l. 2 in the English is still wrong. 🇹
At the start I believed Love would start out easily So you did not allow me to, But I put you in my heart I know there will be one day That you will leave me for him I just found out that being true Is not enough in love! I move the sky move the earth But no way I can move you I well do know we’ll get to naught But my love still falters not I move the sky move the earth But no way I can move you Always thought love would bring miracles Just cheated me myself I believe I will no more love you Keep away so that you won’t hurt me Though I’ve already forgot myself I still really want to have news from you I move the sky move the earth But no way I can move you I well do know we’ll get to naught But my love still falters not I move the sky move the earth But no way I can move you Always thought love would bring miracles Just cheated me myself |
Dzã kheħẏí/ a-mä’kstá/ Òxke/ ṁa bũ trě fagè/ks Dakra/ dzaye/b afä/ed óƀ Sed fa/nged óƀ dzã ṁin Asapèks/ dliś dzã ka júx I ye u í-itśekshwei/ Tsan fa/śare òxke/ ṁa bũ Djinsi/ n-è/ed dju i-pò/’ks Aga/nèks tĩl ga/nèks těxl Sed antsa/n gana/re óƀ Ben ben sapè/ks ánfru/tèkshwei Sed ṁa etś u-nesitdje/ing Aga/nèks tĩl ga/nèks těxl Sed antsa/n gana/re óƀ Thö amä/ed ṁa u-a/khwei álz Sed dji atcít'dje/ing’ks’ta ma’n Amãè/ks n-areśäè/kshwei óƀ Ariuè/kshwei dzã nupé/na fámŕ Ṯòx djam awńgèksata/ maħu/n Äk’r aśä/èks aga/re nyū/zi de óƀ Aga/nèks tĩl ga/nèks těxl Sed antsa/n gana/re óƀ Ben ben sapè/ks ánfru/tèkshwei Sed ṁa etś u-nesitdje/ing Aga/nèks tĩl ga/nèks těxl Sed antsa/n gana/re óƀ Thö amä/ed ṁa u-a/khwei álz Sed dji atcít'dje/ing’ks’ta ma’n |
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