Things have been going well for the Greyfolk language and things have been going well for me. You’re probably here for the Greyfolk language, but let’s start with me. Since my last update, my girlfriend has graduated from her dual master’s program at IU. That’s fun! I haven’t done anything too amazing like that, but I did beat Dishonored without killing anyone—in the game and in real life.
As for the Greyfolk language, I did decide on a new glyph for «h». It’s the one that looks like an ‘M’. Of course, I haven’t given context for that, so I’ll go ahead and post the new «h» as well as the runners-up soon.
Also, I’ve been doing my [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Prepositions and postpositions’ on Wikipedia“]adpositions[/su_tooltip] wrong this whole time, which is fun. “Hoy mia feke dio!” I exclaimed in Esperanto. My language is head-initial, so it should have prepositions and not postpositions.
Then, I started thinking about [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Compound (linguistics)’ on Wikipedia“]compounds[/su_tooltip] and [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Relativizer’ on Wikipedia“]relativizers[/su_tooltip]. The past six entries in my language document have been about those two things, but they’ve mostly been about relativizers. For compound words, I’m just using a some kind of compounding particle in between words to solve my problem. It’s good enough. For relative clauses, I figured out my relativizer and I proposed adding an [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Elision’ on Wikipedia“]elidible[/su_tooltip] phrasalizer (like a [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Nominalization’ on Wikipedia“]nominalizer[/su_tooltip] for phrases or like a [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Terminators’ on Lojban For Beginners“]terminator from Lojban[/su_tooltip]) to show where those clauses end. It will also be useful for signifying names. Speaking of which, I’m also proposing a name particle to introduce names as well.
That means I was also working on [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Phrase structure rules’ on Wikipedia“]phrase structure rules[/su_tooltip]. I wish I had my old syntax workbook from when I took that class because the internet really doesn’t have a good resource for phrase structure rules. Luckily, I found the ones I used for the previous incarnation of the Greyfolk language.
- S → NPE VP T (NPO) (NPU)
- NP → N (DP) (AdjP+) (PP+) (CP)
- DP → D
- AdjP → Adj
- PP → P NP
- VP → V (PP) (AdvP+) (CP)
- AdvP → Adv
- CP → Comp S
- X → X Conj X
That may prove useful for someone else someday. Furthermore, I started taking another deep look at [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to the Pandunia website”]Pandunia[/su_tooltip] again for some inspiration. Also, [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Lojban’ on Wikipedia“]Lojban[/su_tooltip]. Also, [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Semantic primes’ on Wikipedia“]semantic primes[/su_tooltip].
I thought about adding a coronal [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Affricate consonant’ on Wikipedia“]affricate[/su_tooltip] to my language, but, after some thinking, I ultimately decided against it because the internet tends to favor only one [su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Sibilant’ on Wikipedia“]sibilant[/su_tooltip] in an international auxiliary language—which I’m not exactly going for, but I like following some of the ideals.
Last but not least, I realized that, if «h» can be Ø ([su_tooltip style=”dark” position=”north” content=”This is a link to ‘Zero (linguistics)’ on Wikipedia“]null[/su_tooltip]), then it can’t be followed by «l», «w», or «y».
Most of these paragraphs could (and probably will) be a post of their own. It shouldn’t take another two weeks.