Creative Runoff

Yeah, yeah, I left you hanging for two weeks.  Happens.  With luck I’ll be able to post again tomorrow.

Anyway, nouns in CLS are either masculine, feminine, or neutral.  Just like in the real world, these classifications do not matter.  In fact, their only purpose is to fuck with you.

Nouns are also either singular, dual, or plural.  English has both singular and plural, but not dual forms of nouns.  Dual means that, if that noun case is used, there are two of whatever.  Thus, Zeg darta therä - “demon hates me” (I didn’t use ‘a’ because we haven’t gotten to that yet and it would just confuse you), while Zegr darta theräe - “two demons hate me”, Zëg darta theräe - “demons[more than two] hate me”. If either the dual or the plural is used, the conjugation of the verb changes.

Anyway, for translations of the words used: Dath, Datha, Dathel – fire, fires[two], fires[more than two]; Bvüd, Bvüdf, Bvüda – house, houses[two], houses[more than two]; Zeg, Zegr, Zëg – demon, demons[two], demons[more than two].

With luck tomorrow there shall be a post.  Good day, and god be with you I hope you drown.

So, uh… the Alaran new year occurs umm… one day after ours, due to a political dispute that arose between the houses of Niara and Atralang in the year 289… both sides wanted to have really big new years parties, and… uh… okay, yeah, I got nothing.

Sorry for breaking my promise and not posting ’till after new years. But there was a lot to type.

Click here for gratuitous verbage.

Yeah, I should’ve gotten rid of the wiggly red lines before I screencapped, but that does not concern me. That’s a lot of shit to read, so it’s really just there for a reference. If any of you memorize it, I will be very surprised, as I haven’t. At all. I constantly need to look at it to figure out what the hell is going on.

The reason there are so many verb tenses is twofold: one, there are four verb forms, categorized by their endings, -eg, -as, -at, and -ül. Two, CLS distinguishes both in terms of time (past, present, future) and evidentiality (knowledgeable, hearsay, assumption). What that means is that there is a specific verb conjugation for whether you know something to be true, you’ve heard it’s true, or you assume it’s true. This is why a lot of the verb conjugations are so long – they cut out some of the useless language fluff. So “I heard John hates you” would simply be “John thal theraä”. “I assume you felt her” would be “That ata zhadheka” while “I heard you felt her” would be “That ata zhadhala” and “I know you felt her” would be “That ata zhadhakh”. It simplifies the language quite a bit. Apologies for the examples being so dirty, but by my calculations I’ve been awake for something like twenty-two hours now, and when I’m tired my creativity takes a dive into the perverse.

Anyway, next post should be on either noun declension or all the forms of “to be”, the one after that should be whichever one I didn’t do the previous time, and the one after that should be on clitics. These posts will be in pretty quick succession, as they’ll be short. It’ll be great… I have to go pass out now.

Now for the second post of my languageness. In the last post I went over the sounds making up CLS. I shall now go over the basic grammar and introduce the pronouns.

The basic sentence structure in CLS is SOV. Thus: Drak thal there – “I hate you”, where drak is “I” thal is “you” and there is “hate”.

(note on pronunciation: english speakers will be tempted to pronounce “there” as the english “there”. There are, however, no silent e’s in CLS, so “there” is pronounced with two syllables. Also, remember that “th” is unvoiced, as in the english “thin”)

CLS has seven noun cases, which will be gone over more deeply in future posts. These cases are Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Locative, Vocative, and Instrumental. Nominative is the subject of a sentance – in the sentence “God is dead”. Accusative is the object of a sentence – in “God is a chameleon“, a chameleon is in the accusative case. Dative indicates an indirect object – “God sent an angel to slay me“. You can tell what part of a sentence the Dative is by removing it and seeing if the sentence still makes sense. “God sent an angel” makes sense, while “God sent to slay me” only kind of does. Anything in the dative case is not strictly necessary to the meaning of the sentence.

Genitive indicates possession. Thus, “My God is dead.” Locative indicates that something is a location – “God went to Puerto Rico“. Vocative indicates that you are addressing the person/thing in question – “Hey, God!” Instrumental indicates that something is being used for something – “God smote me with a thunderbolt.” Instrumental, similar to dative, can also usually be removed without significantly altering the meaning of the sentence.

Pronouns are a very important part of a language. It’s hard to tell someone they’re a dumbass without using the word “you”, and it’s equally challenging to tell them you think they suck without using “I”. Below is a table of basic pronouns. There’s an assload of them. They are presented in all the cases, though both locative and instrumental are highly situational (I went to him, I hit the wall with him)

Click here.

Yeah, yeah, it’s not very pretty. But when it gets down to it, neither is your mother. Anyway, a bit to explain. There are more pronouns, by far, then there are in English. This is because of several things. One, I have seven cases, and there’s no doubles, as in the English “you” (used for both accusative and nominative). Two, CLS distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive we (whether or not the ‘we’ includes the addressee or not – the difference between “we should go to japan” and “we will kill you”).

Third, my third-person pronouns distinguish on six levels, as opposed to English, which distinguishes on three (male, female, and other). CLS has the male, female, nongender, object, animal, and abstract pronouns. Most of those explain themselves (abstract is used for things that cannot be nailed down – an answer, for example. “I know it!” – “Drak ëtet kharte!”) Nongender is used for when you aren’t sure of a person’s gender – “Dude, we have Professor Gold, awesome!” “Why, is he/she cool?” Yeah, you can do that without a slash in CLS.

Next post you get verb tense. Which is gonna be crazy, ’cause verb tense distinguishes based on both evidentiality and time. So there’s one cubic assload of verb tenses. Look forward to a shitload of tables, y’all.

I’d apologize for not posting for two weeks, but I have no doubt you’ve heard it all before. Anyway, this is the first post of me diagramming my language, CLS.

Okay. First off, here are the various sounds that make up CLS:

Vowel Sounds:
a – as in “bar”
e – as in “lend”
u – as in “bun”
ä – as in “lay”
ë – as in “bean”
ü – as in “boon”

Consonant Sounds:
p – as in “put”
t – as in “take”
k – as c in “cat”

b – as in “bun”
d – as in “dog”
g – as in “god”

f – as in “far”
th – as in “thin”
s – as in “sat”
sh – as in “shut”
kh – as ch in german “Bach”

v – as in “vanguard”
dh – as th in “they”
z – as in “zap”
zh – as s in “pleasure”
gh – no english/german equivalent, voiced ‘kh’. Form sound by going through the unvoiced fricatives (f, th, s, sh, kh) and then going through the voiced fricatives (v, dh, z, zh, gh)

pf – combination of p and f, as german “pferd”
ts – combination of t and s, as german z at beginning of word
ch – combination of t and sh, as in “chain”

bv – combination of b and v, no english/german equivalent
dz – combination of d and z, no english/german equivalent
j – combination of d and zh, as in “jail”

r – as in “red”
l – as in “lore”

If you’ll notice, the consonants are sorted into seven sections: unvoiced stops, voiced stops, unvoiced fricatives, voiced fricatives, unvoiced affricates, voiced affricates, and approximants. I know those words don’t mean anything to you unless you’ve got some knowledge of linguistics, so I’ll explain: stops are consonants that stop the airflow entirely. Fricatives only partially block it. Affricates are combinations of stops and fricatives. Approximants barely stop the airflow. The difference between a voiced and an unvoiced consonant is whether or not your vocal cords are vibrating. There are also nasals, like n, m, and ng, but I don’t have any of those in my language.

Anyway, those are the sounds that make up my language. Next post I’ll begin with some common words and some elementary grammar.

Sorry for not getting this posted sooner, I had a huge project due friday and yesterday I was busy being lazy. And watching a pirated copy of Pirates Of The Caribbean 3.

Anyway: I present to you, my alphabet! Known as CWS, or Chris’s Writing System (aren’t I so creative?):

Several things require explanation: first of all, I did it in flash. Never attempt to write out your fictional alphabet in flash. It’s just not really very pretty. Second, despite the variation in letter sizes, all letters are supposed to be roughly the same size. I just made the capitals look mondohumgeous because they’re more detailed.

Thirdly, there are just some rules of CWS that are not what you call self-evident. I shall go over these now (along with helpful examples!):

1) Every word begins with a capital.

“I am god” –

2) When using vowels: Use Atvas vowels first. If there are two consecutive vowels, place a Naros above the Atvas.

“Book” –

When three consecutive vowels occur, surround the Naros with a number of dots equal to the number of peaks on the Atvas

“Beauty” – – the u-Atvas has four peaks.

3) After a capital letter, the Atvas of a vowel is always used, even if the capital is a vowel.

4) The y-Atvas is used only after a vowel, and the y-Naros is used only after a consonant.

“Bay” – , “Wry” –

5) The last down-stroke of the last letter in a word may be left off, or kept on. Both are correct.

“Bar” – , ; “Rad” – ,

6) Punctuation is placed immediately after a word, and the next word continues without any space between.

“I am god. You?” –

And that’s my alphabet. If you’ll notice, it is entirely cursive – there is no non-cursive form of this alphabet. There’s also no way to represent numbers as of yet, but whatever. Next post I’ll begin diagramming my language, CLS (bet you can’t guess what that stands for)