#elessic

[emberfell]

Voicing Pairs

I’ve come to a point in my work on Elessic where I have a very important decision to make with the Gwilith orthography system.

Gwilith differentiates voicing pairs (g/k, d/t, b/p, ktp) by taking a base glyph and adding a mark to change the voicing. When I was deciding which would be considered the “base” and which would be the “modified” glyphs, I looked at all the sounds in the language and determined that there are more voiced than voiceless, and therefore Voiced should be the default, and the mark should indicate voiceless sounds.

This was because I initially intended for ALL glyphs to be marked as Voiced or Voiceless, not just pairs.

Later, I dropped the mandatory marking, and began actually making the language. As I did, I found I gravitated towards voiceless sounds. Sounds like /s/ and /t/ come up a lot (/s/ is probably the most common consonant in the language), and as I progress, it’s become increasingly annoying to write common suffixes like [si], [st], and [t].

I’m considering inverting Voicing Pairs, so that Voiceless sounds are unmarked and Voiced sounds are marked (like how Japanese works).

I’m open to advice if anyone has any.

[emberfell]

New font incoming!

[emberfell]

la bɪðɪz vu dodrem ni gʌfran yRi hæp wara i elstaĉ kwenyanþ.

It’s a pangram, including all ligatures and non-ligature forms, as well as a syllabic consonant.

It means “I will dutifully sing of seasons and times from before wolves and going east.”

bɪðɪz is an adverb meaning “with the hope of doing well,” which I translated as “dutifully.”

This phrase often precedes folkloric poems, indicating that the story is from before the Elves came to Strigana (even if that’s not necessarily true).

It’s like “Once upon a time,” but with some added symbolism about the universality of poetic elements, because it’s a pangram?

[emberfell]

I decided arbitrarily that the Elessic word for “to divide” (as in, split up two dissimilar things, not to merely cut something in two) and “to judge” is the same word.

This word is odand

Therefore, a “divide” or a “judgement” is odek

The Divide (the place in Pelerian) is tel odekath, or “The Great Divide/Judgement.”

[emberfell]

I solved two Elessic problems at work today:

1) “Mine,” “Yours,” “His,” ktp, were giving me trouble because I couldn’t figure out a way to derive them from the base pronouns and still be able to inflect them easily. I solved this by saying that “My” is the same as “Mine” and so on. Conceptually, instead of saying “That is mine,” you’re saying “That is my [book]” and instead of repeating the noun that the conversation is about, you’re just referring back to it.

2) I’ve really struggled with some difficult parts of correlatives. For example, saying “He’s the one who robbed me” uses “who” in a non-questioning way, and even though other languages use this same form, I could never quite wrap my head around it conceptually. Yeah, it’s algebraic (“who” is like x, which equals the preceding “He”), but it never felt natural to me in Elessic. Therefore, I came up with bas, a word that fills in for these weird correlatives. I’m still figuring out the exact context for it, but I think it replaces a correlative which refers directly to something already mentioned in the sentence (or possibly an obvious topic in the conversation). I’ve also toyed with the idea of using bas for times when you say like “When I go to sleep,” where in English you’re pointing to something using a question word (but this is super uncertain and I haven’t done enough tests with it yet).

[lavenantanokto]

nasals might be the solution to my pronoun problem

[emberfell]

Pronouns continue to be the absolute worst thing ever.

I realized a problem with my current setup. I’ll use la (“I”) as the example, using my current methods.

la - I lat - Me (Indirect Object) lad - Me (Direct Object)

las - My laz - My (multiple possessions) last - My (Indirect Object) lazt - My (multiple possessions, Indirect Object) lasd - My (Direct Object) lazd - My (multiple possessions, Direct Object)

So here’s are the problems:

last already means “towards me,” and can’t also mean “my (Indirect Object)” because the contexts the two words appear in is too similar.

ALSO, because of how language works, lazt, lazd, lasd are indistinguishable when spoken aloud.

I considered reverting the -d ending to -k, but you’d still have the problem of [z] causing the [k] to sound like a [g] and I don’t know if I like that.

[emberfell]

On the subject of suffixes that only work in specific cases: Let’s compare some things.

If you add -dal to something, that makes it a person, and that works in all cases because “-dal” means “person.”

With some things, a specific group of words will have a suffix that applies only to those words in a specific way, such as the cardinal directions taking -a to form “the area that is to the [direction].”

Another example:

ai - Vision, Sight ain - Eye aind - To See

The -nd is the standard verb formant, but the “intermediate” -n is only applicable in the case of senses in order to form the sensory organ.

wa - Hearing wan - Ear wand - To Hear

er - Sense of Smell ern - Nose ernd - To Smell

and so on with the rest of the senses