#high gavellian

[ijosijen]

"Isolating Language"

that was the initial goal, at least. in the end, the answer for how synthetic high gavellian turned out depends entirely on the analysis.

[ijosijen]

Word Ordering

Ancient Gavellian had a pretty free word order, so it gets defaults/topical ordering.

there's also a lot of papering over going on in here. F'a is a tense marker blended into a gerund marker. lona/ōnneta are closer in meaning to estar than to seem. AG didn't yet have a word for "to write" in that way, instead using a construction ~"to make writing." a lower-level translation for that last sentence in HG would be smth like "however, to it is taken a need for an age." but that passive "take" is just the "have" construction.

[ijosijen]

Spelling Loanwords

The Gavellian orthography situation is a jenga tower mess. The list of legal syllables is much longer than the list of common ones, and the spelling system is definitely tuned towards the latter.

So when loanwords come about, it's been trending towards "things are a mess." I made a post on that, recently.

Yet a few languages have a prestigious/privileged/close position to High Gavellian. They get the Greek > Latin treatment. Spelling conventions unique to loanwords entering HG from their language.

One of the Sellan Areal langs (the "Low Gavellians") I've been working on is on that list - Old Kaande.

Now, bespoke slash conventional spelling naturalisations don't mean small or regular or good or any of that nonsense. I'm still trying to aim for that unreachable holy grail of "feeling naturalistic," here. But it's something.

Old Kaande ortho on the leftmost column, the way that the spelling gets rendered in High Gavellian on the rightmost.

HRC (Historical R-Cluster) is a special spelling rule in the Gavellian systems that changes vowel length and often quality when appearing after an <r> in an opening consonant cluster.

(It's "historical" because that <r> isn't pronounced. HRC started as cluster reduction + compensatory lengthening, but it's gotten a bit out of hand since then, both in and out of universe.)

[ijosijen]

High Gavellian Dictionary #17

[ijosijen]

4x Translation

[ijosijen]

Ship of Theseus Language Evolution

You're gonna have to do a bunch of squinting in this specific example if you want to call Demotic Gavellian a serious evolution past Koine/High. But there are some caveats:

The provided pronunciation for HG is the Cadan Standard, which was made by and for... late Demotic speakers.

The actual plumbing of the syntax is wildly different. Demotic has a bunch of very HG like structures, sure, but the clausal system is halfway in the grave & the default word order has changed, as have a whole bunch of basic particles.

There have been some sound shifts. Nothing insane, but the sound system has absolutely shuffled around a bit, even since late Koine.

Also: in-setting, the High Gavellian orthography is is all that's happening from here on. Sellan scribes are about to pull a tibetan. Hence, the Demotic example has a diagetic HG transliteration up top in bold and an actual practical romanization in the first gloss line. <h> isn't assigned to any single phoneme rn, it's the digraph marker.

The transliteration to the romanization is still remarkably transparent to my addled brain, so we'll see how bad it gets once we hit Middle Gavellian's tonogenesis.

[ijosijen]

translation of an excerpt from the analects.

[ijosijen]

The High Gavellian Orthoaesthetic

(the following is lorem ipsum text thrown together from recent translations)

...

Tintate causiot craôae om fiaen vaer civaecayl. Do dejan do rella fon ozi sil tiovu egil. Hinjen, haci tau cin nu vu si sento ne sieon, inca ti la a haci cin dejan vamfe neylos etene, inca ahin. Ne zech dejani qira nalle theilyo hita soc séno atta. A-ti vil zrygre ne tau fryno susénul. Vil ne nu vu a sillé's e'q eison nalltione oumve osúmovo-alló ti péseimosiffas neswé. Do cin mosu ny pau, ai si neylos uwésae inca t'as-a fe son isha mosu na siae. Inca t'as om aciuse ochne a Hinein as a ti laennechusellre.

Laqu ai set do lludire ól uvau faesuen vil ne péte pondaur vadae flavae si aegaeo do neylos pisac siae. Rio jes do fraes soson neylos tiesau lon-eanqon tosich crahae. Ti van enes Sianein ne ozi tio tiegor tauch. Fe qir'om inlya résaech ti qalqo lludiré llu kugiu. Tauch sum lona laqu e-ti távas n'om ause aur, e aquto fi sellae va távas om wrar jes ll'equo neti laen sofur. Om fraes tiégovae qarqo auxae vuebxen, ta om fraes péco qarqo vuebxen auxae. Oŕa qalqo zech, nilye haci uvau lan ta sial ta tral, si as qa nesrich sie om vamfe hiva zech.