Drowning in information

A mërèchi idiom: àgë ràcü càshisöp'n, ní kasírisöp'n. "My brain is càshi but not síri". càshi means wet externally, even dripping, and síri means soaked, saturated or humid; so this translates roughly as "My brain is wet (with information) but it's not soaking in".

Recent developments in Mirexu

It seems that I haven't written here about Mirexu, mërèchi's sister language. Perhaps there wasn't anything much to write by the time I stopped updating.

Mirexu has been used in two Conlang relays, numbers 15 and 16. The text I produced for Relay 15 was quite satisfying, but inbetween then and Relay 16, I lost my notes on when to use which kinds of complement clause. The resulting text for Relay 16 is painful for me to read; every single sentence ended up being a content-filled subordinate clause and an empty main clause consisting only of a modal verb (sometimes two deep!).

So! In an effort to wrench Mirexu back from the wrongheaded direction it took off the rails over a year ago, I recently resumed development.

Mirexu is meant to be a polysynthetic language. I'm attempting to build it entirely out of inflected forms of noun and verb roots, as Comrie analyzes Tamil to be. I am also drawing upon Abkhaz for inspiration. All of the roots and many of the bound morphemes are imported from mërèchi through a regular sound change process which mainly affects the vowels.

The corrections made so far, on the 19th of January, are:

• situational possibility (can, is able to) is to be expressed with the derivational morpheme -se on the main verb, instead of the construction using a complement clause in -i followed by the fully inflected verb aisen, "may"
• situational necessity (must, needs to) will use the newly-created derivational morphemes -dju (for positive necessity) and -dar (for negative necessity), instead of the construction using a negated complement clause and the fully inflected verb adarusan, "must not"
• epistemic possibility and necessity will probably still use a periphrastic construction, unless I introduce evidential morpemes

Other blemishes introduced by the relay which still need to be corrected include:

• create a way to say "always" without using the verb root kumela "to continue on"
• create an overall scheme for the treatment of "any", "every", "each" etc. without needing adverbs, adjectives or periphrastic constructions
• address conditional statements, both if...then and when...then

There is a lot of work to do!

Thoughts on the seasons

The original seven-season cycle which interacts dynamically with the mërèchi calendar was as follows:

pëhlètim (frost)
pëfòrnim (snow)
pëgànim (waking)
pëlúthim (flower)
p'élatim (leaf)
pëshírim (growing)
pëníltëm (singing)

and füshín (mild, a condition rather than a season). Except for füshín, which has no beginning or end but is applied to any day that qualifies, each season begins when its namesake is first observed and ends when the next season begins. Some of them, however, are too short, and others make no sense (why flower and then leaf? Flower and leaf of what, exactly?)

So here is a set of seven I am contemplating replacing them with, to better spread out the seasons across my Zone 6 year:

frost
snow
crocuses
green (when most of the trees begin to look green from a distance)
fireflies
cicadas
gold (when the leaves turn)

Grammaticalized adjectives

Many languages have a small closed class of words or affixes which encode some of the most basic concepts for which we in English use adjectives. For example, Japanese "-i adjectives", unlike their "na adjectives", are a closed class (meaning that new -i adjectives cannot be created any more than English could just up and create a new preposition and have it make sense to anybody). Some of the concepts for which Japanese uses -i adjectives include: small, big, narrow, wide, old, new, red, white, black, dark, good, and bad.

In Mohawk, adjectives are stative verbs; due to Mohawk's polysynthetic nature, they end up looking like suffixes or (occasionally) circumfixes to the noun when used adjectivally. The particular pair that caught my attention was -owanen (big) and ni- -a'a (small, a circumfix).

Putting the two together, I decided that languages in the mërèchi language family needed to have a small, closed class of adjectival operations which would include all sorts of affixes plus possibly suprasegmental operations to boot. As a first step, I designate two classes of adjectives, a more basic first class for the most extreme sorts of word modification, and a tamer, more derivative second class:

First class (orthogonal)
big/small
dark/light
young/old
good/bad
hot/cold?

Second class (can be derived from 1st)
smooth/rough
easy/hard
long/short
wide/narrow
healthy/sick

I will be back later with the mërèchi forms of these adjectives. My goal is to have no pair work exactly the same way as another.

Why are there two different 'k's in mërèchi?

Well, yes, "because T.E. Hastely spelled it that way," sure. But in the case of 'k' and 'c', he was simply reflecting a distinction preserved in the native orthography. In fact, while the dialect he studied had merged the sounds represented by 'c' and 'k', the distinction was alive and well elsewhere: 'c' is labialized before front vowels, and 'k' is palatalized before back values, giving pronunciations as follows:

Spelling	Pronunciation (mërèchi)	After sound shift (mirexu)
kà	/kja/	/kje/
cà	/kwa/	/kwe/
kè	/kE/	/kE/
cè	/kwE/	/kwE/
ké	/ke/	/ki/
cé	/kwe/	/kwi/
kí	/ki/	/ku/
cí	/kwi/	/kwa/
kú	/kju/	/kjo/
cú	/ku/	/ko/
kó	/kjo/	/kja/
có	/ko/	/ka/
kò	/kjO/	/kjO/
cò	/kO/	/kO/

Note that the mirexu pronunciation which would have sound-shifted into */kwu/ dissimilates into /kwa/, giving a three-way distinction between cí /kwa/, có /ka/, and kó /kja/! Mirexu is also left without a /ke/ or /kju/ sound.

New words for 8/16/07

-dúr: to be anxious about X
yirdúr: to stress over everything
kàkesdür: to stress over nothing at all

-madü: an X which happens regularly or periodically
càlëmadü: menstrual period
yirdúria calëmàdüki: PMS
calëmadüdúria: anxiety about one's period

yirdúria màmi: anxiety of being a mom
mamiadúria: anxiety about motherhood
mamëdúria: anxiety over one's mother!

síri: moist, humid (but not necessarily càshi)
làri: arid, dessicated (but not necessarily kàli)
càshi: wet, dripping (but not necessarily síri)
kàli: dry, can be moist but not damp (not necessarily làri)