Cheunh Adventures

For all my Cheunh musings and conlanging.

[cheunhadventures]

Stae (meaning 'near') is pronounced 'stee'.

Or, in other words, what the fuck, Zahn? You've already got i and ee. You need ae to be pronounced /i/ as well??? I...

Why.

I'm going to make this work, but I hate it. Thanks.

[dragonfly-wings1]

Cheunh Numbering System

They use dozenal/duodecimal because it is objectively better and also I love it.

That is all.

[dragonfly-wings1]

Really wanna give Cheunh honorific speech/grammatical politeness levels due to how stratified their society is.

Also really don't wanna deal with creating the rules for different degrees of speech.

The dilemma.

[dragonfly-wings1]

So. Ozyly-esehembo. Sky-walker.

Esehembo, walker. As in "one who walks", not "a device to assist with walking" (presumably -- though the second option opens up some interesting worldbuilding implications).

The way I've tentatively decided to break it down is (and forgive me, but I have no idea how to do a proper linguistic gloss on Tumblr, especially on mobile):

ese-hem-bo

AGN-walk-HON

So "hem" is the infinitive of the verb walk, "ese" is a prefix indicating a person who does the verb (in English, think teach -> teacher), and "bo" is an honorific suffix that is in this case sort of fossilized onto the entire term -- it might be *grammatically* correct to say "ozyly-esehem" but it Just Sounds Wrong in that context, because a sky-walker is a position of high honor.

Now, if you were talking about your local space dog-walker, then you could just use esehem.

Playing around a bit with ozyly still. Not sure if it's an unmarked-but-archaic word for sky or if there's more going on there.

Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions?

[dragonfly-wings1]

This isn't *super* relevant to the overall functioning of the language, but it's important to me, so y'all are going to have to see it.

The pronunciations of "merit" and "marriage" are going to be as similar in Cheunh as they are in my accent of English (where they differ exclusively at the last consonant), *specifically* because I need them to be able to dismissively refer to a merit adoptive who came in via marriage as a "marriage adoptive" and have it as a reasonable pun.

Is that a silly reason? Yes. Am I gonna do it anyway? Also yes.

[dragonfly-wings1]

Cheunh Pronouns

Because I am incapable of sticking to a single part of speech.

But specifically first person plural pronouns (we/us).

There's something a lot of languages have, called "clusivity" in their first person plural. You have one word that includes the listener ("We should hang out!") and a different word when the group doesn't include them ("We went out yesterday (but you weren't with us).")

And clusivity works *so well* culturally with the Chiss? How defined they are by what groups they are and are not a part of. I've been toying with the idea of a third one, used specifically when you're speaking on behalf of your large in-group (typically family, but also used by fleet officers to refer to the fleet (or, somewhat pretentiously, by some commanders and captains to refer to their ships), and used to refer to the entire Ascendancy when someone is trying to make a point about unity).

So for example, in the Syndicure, Zistalmu wouldn't say, "The Irizi support this plan of action." unless he was trying to make a point that this support came from above him and he disagreed strongly. It would be "We (my family and I) support this plan of action." But if he and Thurfian were proposing something, it would be "We (me and someone else, but not the rest of you) suggest this." Talking directly to Thurfuan, it would be "We (you and I) need to get rid of Thrawn."

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

(NB: I am making no cultural assumptions about RL languages that denote clusivity. The ways language and culture interact are many and varied and not something I can *begin* to unpack.)

[dragonfly-wings1]

More Cheunh Grammar Features

Evidentiality. Or, essentially, grammaticizing how certain you are of any information and/or how you came by it.

English manages this by swapping out the verb, or sometimes by adding a phrase.

Take "He is hungry."

Now, in English, that's a statement of fact. You can make it less certain, for example, "He looks hungry," which is just a shorter way to say "From looking at him, I infer that he is hungry." In that case, he may or may not actually *be* hungry, but you have laid out your source of conjecture.

Or you might say "He told me that he is hungry." In that case, it is still an assertion of fact, but you have laid out the source of your information, so the listener can decide for themselves how trustworthy it is.

I like evidentiality for Cheunh mostly because of all the "perhaps"s we get from Thrawn's PoV, particularly in Treason. It feels like it could be Thrawn trying to carry over an inference marker from his native language, one that's lacking in Basic(/Space English).

So, different languages have different types and degrees of evidence markers. For Cheunh, I'm leaning towards six degrees, listed here roughly in the order of definiteness.

"Csilla is round." Bare statement of theoretically undisputed and indisputable fact, also something easily verified by the senses. Grammatically unmarked.

"Thrawn attacked the enemy (and I witnessed it)." Direct first-hand knowledge of something.

"(It is a matter of historical record that) the Stybla used to be the sole ruling family." Knowledge from an implicitly-trusted source.

"(I infer that) he is tired."/"He looks tired." Inference based on direct sensory evidence.

"(I read that) the Scofti change leaders and governments frequently." Second or third hand information, with the listener left to decide how much trust to place in the information.

"(It is my opinion that) red is the best color." Opinions, theories without any real supporting evidence.

Thrawn almost certainly irritates the ever-loving fuck out of certain people (...pretty much everyone) by treating his art-based deductions as being in category 1, *maybe* 4, when they think they should be category 6 (people who like and trust him would probably accept category 4 as reasonable for most of his deductions, though not all of them).

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

[dragonfly-wings1]

Cheunh Word Order

I debated this one a *lot* with myself. We don't have any translated full sentences, not even Car'das saying that he's a fishing boat, so there's no basis in the books for any particular order.

It is described as a heavily marked language, which frequently (though not always) means that word order is a lot freer, but even languages with a completely fluid word order still tend to have one that's essentially neutral, with other word orders having slightly different connotations.

SOV ("The man the apple ate") and SVO ("The man ate the apple") tend to be the most common among Earth languages, which sort of instinctively makes me want to avoid them for Cheunh. VSO ("Ate the man the apple") is less common, but still not shockingly rare (roughly 10% of Earth languages), and I *do* enjoy verb-first languages in general.

So my current plan is for the unmarked word order to be VSO, but with relative freedom to move sentence components around if one wants to particular stress some part of things.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?