Weeks Nine and Ten

Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a great week!

In these past two weeks, I have been working on figuring out my syntax. This portion of language creation has been the most difficult so far. I’ve run in to lots of problems with the rules of my grammar and have been struggling with trying to properly translate my poetry into my language while making sure the grammar structure is correct. However, I have worked out the bugs and have successfully translated some of my poetry! I’ve finally figured out how to properly translate my sentences into the correct grammar structure for my language. Now I just have to finish translating the rest of my poetry. Below, you will find an example sentence in my language from one of my poems titled (in English), The Night You Died In My Arms: 

Moi  tsu-an  ren-le  malna  ko   moi  tor    k’ol

In      my     arms   died    you  in   that    night

In this sentence, you can see the Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) sentence order. The linguistic rules of my language are as follows: 

Sentence—> Verb Phrase + Noun Phrase

Verb Phrase—> (Preposiontal Phrase) (Noun Phrase) Verb

Noun Phrase—> Determiner + Noun

Within a sentence in my language, prepositional phrases can be either in the front of the sentence or at the end as they are interchangeable. For example, in the sentence above, the phrases, “In my arms” and “on that night” are the prepositional phrases. I write: In my arms died you in that night. But I could also write: In that night died you in my arms and the phrasing would still be correct. 

In terms of my species, I have decided on what to call them. In their language, they are called the Iridrath. The word is composed of two parts: Irid and Rath. The word rath means “person,” while the word Irid essentially means “soul.” Irid has a deeper, spiritual meaning to the culture I have created and refers more specifically to a deep connection they believe the soul has to the rest of the universe. In English, I’m not sure if we would call them: The Iridrath, Iridians, or Iridrathians. I have yet to determine that. As always, thank you for reading and have a great week!

Week Eight

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful week. 

We are winding down to the last month of our research projects. This week, I worked mostly on perfecting my grammar structure. I have decided that my grammar structure is going to be: Went to the park did I. This would employ a structure that has a sentence order of: Object then Verb then Subject. This isn’t found in any human languages, to my knowledge, but I am working on researching that. Because I am not familiar with this grammar structure, I’ve found it to be rather confusing in constructing sentences, but I’m working on diagramming sentences in my poetry to give me an easier time identifying sentence parts. This should make translating my work a little easier. 

I also began reading Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney and it is truly excellent so far! It is relevant to my project as it exemplifies some very interesting linguistic theories, such as the Sapir-Whorf Theory. This theory tries to explain how a speakers language can affect their thoughts and views on the world. The novel uses this theory as a central point in the construction of an alien language that belongs to invaders. I would most absolutely recommend it to any sci-fi and/or language lovers. I hope you all have a great week and thanks for reading!