bloodyrosemccoy | The Language Diaries, Part 4

The Language Bird Demonstrates Grammar (With A Little Help From Its Friends)

Vi Qáşal lal Naicişi :rimulet Nainiam :rifúlta (:uq Rúmemada Lal Naiqáqrul Şaiŕulye)

Vi qáşal naican.

‘The bird is red.’

Vi qáşal tre cúcan.

‘It’s possible that the bird was red.’

Vi qáfeşal tre cúcan.

‘The birds were red.’

Vi qáşal naisqié ecan.

‘The bird is not red.’

Se qáşal lal naican.

‘I am a red bird.’

Şá naisqié qáşal lal naican.

‘You are not a red bird.’

Ŕál túsqié qáfeşal lal naican.

‘None of you could possibly be red birds.’

Vi qáfeşal déqurnaŕe miqurnaŕe.

‘The birds sing a song.’ (Story.)

Vi qafeşal !ua naiqurnaŕe miqurnaŕe

‘The birds will sing a song.’ (Factual.)

Other Sentences

Muq faruq rúmú lal !élúwele !úwán vi miŕiqsú lal vişé şreq ye rúmú lal !efúrefú décundé lal rúm frún.

‘No wise man has the power to reason away what a fool believes he sees.’*

Vi şaistemqát désqié eván elwilúq.

‘The ending has not yet been written.’

Sese ___ naivú:é

‘My name is ___’

Summary

An experimental language for a fuzzy arboreal alien species, the Rúmecilú. Its sounds are influenced loosely by Hindi and Arabic, so that the stops are all voiced further back in the mouth than we do them in English. It also has the Spanish ‘rr’ trill (the ŕ) and a couple of taps (! is alveolar; : is palatal), making it the second language I’ve invented that I can’t pronounce without dislodging my retainer.**

Its syntactic features are some of the more curious ones I’ve used. It has ten noun classes—a clear ripoff from Swahili, though the actual categories are different—and I’m particularly proud of its tense system. The past and future markers are auxiliary verbs, and inflections to the verbs themselves tell how near or remote the event is to the present dialogue, and the degree of reality it represents—fact, possibility, conditionality, or hypothetical/story. There are no adjectives; an object’s state is expressed by verbs that mean something like ‘to be X.’ That gets me working with all sorts of fun new constructs as I figure out out complex ways to say things.

:rimulet’s writing system is second only to Luamavan in completeness. (As versus ones like Luxorndilpo, for which I simply mutilated Futurama’s alien alphabet because I am a lazy bastard.) I seem to have an affiliation for alphabets that have cursive letters and diacritical ones—in Luamavan, the vowels are all joined in cursive and the consonants fill in around them; in :rimulet the consonants are joined and the vowels are diacritical. (This wasn’t done on purpose. I only realized afterward that they were so similar.) It looks like Mongolian,*** and is an extremely good language to henna onto your arm if you’re so inclined.

*Actually, this is a Doobie Brothers line, and don’t even ask why I felt it was important to translate it. I reworded the English line for the translation, because the original is rather convoluted: “What a fool believes he sees no wise man has the power to reason away.” Quite a good song, but the words are a bit awkward.

**If I’m wearing it, which is only at night. In the daytime I generally just spit a lot.

***For those of you who are interested, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm shows some good examples of this. I very much like http://www.omniglot.com/, and you should, too. It’s a source of much inspiration for me. People who are Aspen may especially like this link: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar_welsh.htm.

EDIT: It would seem that LiveJournal is less than thrilled with my schwa character ~ that is, the upside-down e. I have changed it to é in order to have it appear. Thus, the é is actually a schwa. Sorry about the difficulty.