Week Seven

Hello everyone! I hope you have had a great week.

This week, I wrote my first poem in my language! I came up with the type of poem on my own. It is an eight line poem that begins with an eight syllable line and ends with a one syllable line. I am working out the grammar bugs in it, but I really like it as it is right now. It is a fairly simple poem, however, it was very difficult to write! I am trying a method of poetry writing where I am thinking of particular sounds and phrases in my language that I think sound aesthetically pleasing. Once I have written them down, I assign these sounds and words meaning and fix/edit anything in the selected sounds that I don’t like or that don’t fit. It has worked well for this first poem, so I may continue this method for the rest of them. My other method is writing the poems in English and translating them into my language, which I am still working on.

This week, I worked mainly on the syntax of my language. This has been the most difficult part so far. I was having a very hard time figuring out the rules to my grammar structure, however, I spoke to my advisor and he helped me figure out what it is that I needed. For simple sentences, the typical “formula” is: Sentence——> Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase. Within each phrase, there is a set of rules as well. Noun phrases may consist of optional adjectives and prepositional phrases. Verb phrases can contain their own noun phrases. Once I was able to figure out what went into a sentence, I was able to determine what sort of sentence structure I want in my own language. I am considering having a sentence structure that will either look like: 

a) Went to the park I did. OR

b) Went to the park did I.

I also worked on finding more hiatus words in the Gaelic poetry. So far I have found quite a few! I wish there were translations of the poems in the book, however, there are none. My advisor has provided translations for the hiatus words I am finding, which is wonderful. I hope that you all have a wonderful week and thank you for reading!