Monthly Archives: March 2011

Pangram

Translations, , , , , ,

Since I read about the Javanese script a couple of years ago, I’ve been kind of fascinated by the idea of its collation, formerly quoted on Omniglot, and – with better quotability – at the moment to be found in a paper by Michael Everson:

The traditional order of the Javanese script is: ha na ca ra ka da ta sa wa la pa dha ja ya nya ma ga ba tha nga and this order has some currency. (The order is hana caraka, data sawala, padha jayanya, maga bathanga, a sentence which means ‘There were (two) emissaries, they began to fight, their valour was equal, they both fell dead’.) (Everson 5)

I wondered whether something like this would also work for Ayeri, since it draws some inspiration from the phonologies of south-east Asian languages. Now fellow ZBB member Z500 posted a “Translation Challenge” today with a request to translate “The quick brown fox jumped [sic!] over the lazy dog,” the famous test sentence for fonts in Microsoft Windows, into one’s own language. I found the original example very unchallenging, so I finally wanted to tackle the attempt to make a pangram in Ayeri.

Since I’ve reworked this website last month, it is possible to simply enter a regular expression into the text field of the “Advanced Search” page, like this:

^([^aeiou(ay)(ey)(oy)(uy)āēīō]?a?)+$

Querying for this term returns a lengthy list of words that consist of the pattern C(a)C(a)… as in the Javanese example above. I chose to do it this way because using every vowel only once would’ve been extra hard, while there are numerous words that fit the Ca-pattern perfectly. So I played with this list a little, and came up with this:

Ang kamayan para dagās vala, bahu ca!
[gloss]Ang kamayan para dagās vala, bahu ca!
AT be_as_as-3PM.T quick turtle-P lovely, shout-IMP 3PM.LOC[/gloss]
‘They are as quick as a lovely turtle; shout at them!’
or ‘If they are as quick as a lovely turtle, shout at them!’

However, this isn’t a perfect pangram: /u/ and /aː/ occur although I wanted all vowels to be just /a/, and also /j/ occurs twice, since c /t͡ʃ/ corresponds to ty in the ‘native’ script (see “Alphabet” page). The latter issue is debatable, however, since ya is a diacritic there (ya eyra), not the letter ya itself. Due to the sentence beginning with the particle ang this almost-pangram even includes the otherwise silent vowel carrier character, ranyan.

With currently 370 unique results for the word pattern quoted above, it will certainly be possible to make up more pangrams with some patience. Maybe I’ll give this another try sometime else and that time really manage to come up with a pangram the way I intended to make one.

  • Everson, Michael. “Proposal for Encoding the Javanese Script in the UCS.” Evertype. 2011. Michael Everson, 28 Jan. 2008. Web. 29 Mar. 2011.
  • “Javanese.” Ancient Scripts. Lawrence Lo, 2010. Web. 29 Mar. 2011.
  • “Javanese Alphabet.” Omniglot. Writing Systems and Languages of the World. Simon Ager, 2011. Web. 7 Apr. 2010. (Access with ‹waybackmachine.org› on 29 Mar. 2011)
  • Added interlinear formatting and rendition in native script.
  • Another attempt at making a pangram in Ayeri.

Tense and Aspect in Ayeri II

Grammar Musings, , , ,

This is part two in my series on tense and aspect in Ayeri. This time, we’re dealing with past tense, or references that involve past time. That points in the past are expressed with the simple past tense is taken for granted here. However, note that Ayeri distinguishes three levels of past: immediate (just a moment ago), ‘normal’ (some time ago), remote (long ago). Of course, these are fuzzy, subjective categories, so it is no use to try and define how many minutes, months, or years have to pass until an event is recounted in one of the respective past tenses. Also, since Ayeri is slightly droppy regarding grammatical marking of categories expressed by context or adverbs in the same sentence, the tense markers are frequently dropped as long as the reference is clear. This will be illustrated in many of the examples below. As in the last post on this topic, these example sentences come from Leech and Svartvik.

B1. State up to present time

Since Ayeri does not have a morphologically marked perfect, simple present is used here with a time adverbial (pericanya-ikan masahatay ‘for many years’) indicating that the state has been going on for a period before and leading up to now:

I’ve known her for years.
Ang koronay (edauyi) yes pericanya-ikan masahatay.
ang koron-ay-Ø (edauyi) yes perican-ya=ikan masahatay
AF know-1S.FOC (now) 3SF.P year-LOC=many since.

B2. Indefinite event(s)

This is basically the same as in B1:

I’ve seen better plays.
Ang silvay maritay ajānyeas baneng.
ang silv-ay-Ø maritay ajān-ye-as ban-eng
AF see-1S.FOC before play-PL-P good-COMP.

Since the past reference is clarified by using maritay ‘before’, the sentence is grammatical even without marking the verb explicitly for past tense.

B3. Habit up to present time

Since this category is about habit, I included the habitual marker -asa- in the example sentence below, however it feels unnatural to use there. What is important is the word masahatay ‘since/for’, as above, which establishes the time reference of an action that lasts up to the time of speaking. Use -asa- additionally to emphasize that this was a habitual action (“He used to conduct…”):

He’s conducted that orchestra for 15 years.
Sa lant(asa)yāng (edauyi) eda-tingrayeno pericanya [base no=”15″ base=”12″ show=”0″] masahatay.
sa lant-(asa-)yāng (edauyi) eda=tingrayeno-Ø perican-ya [base no=”15″ base=”12″ show=”1″] masahatay
PF lead-(HAB-)3SM.A (now) this=orchestra-FOC year-LOC 15 since.

To be honest, I don’t know anymore where I got tingrayeno from exactly, but it looks like a compound, and it involves tingra ‘tune, melody, music’, maybe also yenu ‘group’ with an older (and even meta-factually!) fossilized nominalizer -no fused. However, the compound would then be the wrong way round, ‘music group’ ought to be yenutingra if it were regular. One of the woes of not keeping track too closely on where you get your compound expressions from.

B4. [Past action] With present result

The simple past tense is used here:

You’ve ruined my dress!
Le kādruvāng vehim nā!
le kə-adru-vāng vehim-Ø nā
PF.INAN IPST-destroy-2S.A dress-FOC 1S.GEN

Note that the immediacy of action is expressed by the immediate past tense marker kə- here.

B5. Temporary state up to present time

And again, the present tense is used here together with a time adverb (iri ‘already’) to indicate that the state leads up to present time. The adverb manga may be used here especially to emphasize the large amount of time the state/action took:

I’ve been waiting for an hour.
Ang manga galamay pidimeri men iri.
ang manga galam-ay-Ø pidim-eri men iri
AF PROG wait-1S.FOC hour-INS one already.

B6. Temporary habit up to present time

This is like B5, only that you may empasize the habituality of the action with the habitual marker:

He’s been walking since he was 8 months old.
Ang lamp(asa)ya henanya koncanena yā masahatay.
ang lamp-(asa-)ya-Ø hen-an-ya koncan-ena yā masahatay
AF walk-(HAB-)3SM.FOC eight-NMLZ-LOC month-GEN 3SM.GEN since.

In Ayeri it is more natural to say ‘since his eighth month’. Henan ‘eighth’ is formed by nominalizing hen ‘eight’, masahatay ‘since’ is a postposition and requires its head to be marked as an adverbial of place, hence the locative marker -ya.

B7. Temporary, with present result

Like in most of the other cases, there is no indication of the completeness of the action here, so for past reference, the simple past is used. The progressive marker manga is not usually used in this situation either:

You’ve been smoking!
Mərunuvāng!
mə-runu-vāng
PST-smoke-2S.A!

To be continued…

Since the table in Leech and Svartvik consists of all in all 26 distinctive action types in three large groups with a couple of subdivisions, it would be too much to cover everything in one post, so I will post those groups as a series of entries. This also permits me to think about this topic as I have time to translate the sentences: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4.

  • Leech, Geoffrey, and Jan Svartvik. A Communicative Grammar of English. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 2002. 82–83. Print.

Tense and Aspect in Ayeri I

Grammar Musings, , , ,

Some weeks ago, I posted a “translation challenge” about tense and aspect in peoples’ conlangs to the ZBB (the thread has pruned by now), using the example sentences from Leech and Svartvik’s Communicative Grammar of English which were used by my Applied Grammar II class teacher. The examples, which revolve around strategies to express notions of points, processes, states, and habits at different levels of time in English, I found to be more or less useful to show how other languages express the presented distinctions, even though there may be mergers or differences present in English which are not made in other languages. This is why this list should be handled with care as far as conlanging goes. Even for the examples of how English deals with the different action-in-time types there are mergers, however.

Generally, Ayeri distinguishes present – which is unmarked – from three degrees each of past and future: immediate, ‘normal’ (if there’s better terminology, let me know), and distant. However, when the time frame is clear, e.g. by use of temporal adverbs, tense prefixes are not mandatory. On top of this, Ayeri distinguishes two aspects: habitual and progressive. Habitual aspect is indicated by an infix -asa-, progressive aspect by the modal particle manga. Manga is also found as a modifier of prepositions that marks movement. However, these markers are not as frequently used as e.g. the progressive aspect in English.

For simplicity, I’ve translated the example sentences from Leech and Svartvik from English into Ayeri. See the “Works cited” below for reference and credit.

A1. State

For simple statements that express a general state at the present time, the present tense is used:

I like Mary.
Ang vacay sa Mary.
ang vac-ay-Ø sa Mary
AF like-1S.FOC P Mary.

A2. Single event

For single current events, the present tense is used as well:

I resign.
Pampangyang.
pampang-yang (pampang- < pang~pang-, ‘ITER~back’)
resign-1S.A.

A3. Habits

For general habits, the present habitual is used:

She gets up early.
Biganasayeng benem.
bigan-asa-yeng benem
get_up-HAB-3SF.A early

Note that in English, the present tense already covers this function, while the habitual aspect needs to be specially marked in Ayeri.

A4. Temporary actions

For currently ongoing, but temporary actions, the progressive marker manga can be used, but only optionally so, to emphasize the temporary nature of the action and that it is performed at this very moment:

He’s drinking Scotch.
Ang (manga) ginya le Scotch.
ang (manga) gin-ya-Ø le Scotch.
AF (PROG) drink-3SM.FOC P.INAN Scotch.

A5. Temporary habits

She’s getting up early (nowadays).
Biganasayeng benem luga eda-bahisyēa.
bigan-asa-yeng benem luga eda=bahis-ye-ea
get_up-HAB-3SF.A early during this=day-PL-LOC.

Here, it is necessary to mention the time reference ‘these days’ (I shamelessly translated from English here because I couldn’t think of anything better) to indicate that this is not a general habit – as above – but one that has been going on for a while already, and also will at least for some time in the future.

To be continued…

Since the table in Leech and Svartvik consists of all in all 26 distinctive action types in three large groups with a couple of subdivisions, it would be too much to cover everything in one post, so I will post those groups as a series of entries. This also permits me to think about this topic as I have time to translate the sentences: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

  • Leech, Geoffrey, and Jan Svartvik. A Communicative Grammar of English. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 2002. 82–83. Print.

Tahano (Nu)Veno(n) font

Scripts, Stuff, , , , , , , , ,

Tahano (Nu)veno(n)Just in case this was missed by anyone … If you’ve been following my work you may remember I used to have this Vine Script thing, which was an ornamental alphabet that took inspiration for its characters from climbing plants. Rebecca Bettencourt, fellow Conlang-L reader, made a font of it last year. We agreed that it would be freeware and that I could offer it for download. I’ve not done so up to now.

I earlier deleted information on the script here as I didn’t see it directly related to Ayeri anymore, but I still used to receive requests about it occasionally. Since the alphabet itself is kind of pretty – although I’ve only ever seen it as a minor experiment and never used it actively to write longer passages in Ayeri with because it is simply too unwieldy for that purpose – I didn’t want it to get lost completely. Essentially, you may want to think of it as the equivalent of an EP in music.

The font is self-transcribing, basically. There’s also a page on the script as it was digitalized on Omniglot, you may want to check that for documentation, as well as the Readme file included in the ZIP archive.

Download (MD5: e9228a56fefadccce3c1abda8bc4456e; 59,355 bytes)

  • The description of Tahano Veno from the old Benung page can be downloaded as a PDF as well. It doesn’t significantly differ from the description at Omniglot, though.

Base converter shortcode WordPress plugin

Stuff, , , , ,

A plugin to convert numbers in base 10 to other number bases, including their decimal places. You can insert this into pages and posts with a shortcode:

[​base no="NUMBER" base="BASE TO CONVERT TO" prec="DECIMAL PLACES" show="SHOW BASE AS INDEX"​]

  • no is a real number, decimal places are set off by a dot, so a valid input is e.g. 12.3456.
  • base is the base you want to convert to as an integer, e.g. 12.
  • prec is an integer number that defines how many places you want after the decimal point. If you leave this out, the number returned will have the same number of places after the dot as the input. A valid input would be e.g. 3.
  • show is a boolean value, i.e. either 0 for ‘no’ or 1 for ‘yes’, that enables or disables showing the base of the result as an index after it, like 10A₁₂. If you leave this out, 0 will be assumed.

For example, the following codes gives the following result:

[​base no="1234" base="2" show="1"​]
→ [base no=”1234″ base=”2″ show=”1″]

[​base no="123.4567" base="16" show="0"​]
→ [base no=”123.4567″ base=”16″ show=”0″]

The script can also round up or down:

[​base no="0.142857" base="12" prec="20"]
→ [base no=”0.142857″ base=”12″ prec=”20″]

The same, shortened to 3 places:
[​base no="0.142857" base="12" prec="3"​]
→ [base no=”0.142857″ base=”12″ prec=”3″]

The same, shortened to 5 places:
[​base no="0.142857" base="12" prec="5"​]
→ [base no=”0.142857″ base=”12″ prec=”5″]

Download

“Sa silvu gumo nā, nay prisu, vāng si lita!”

Translations, , , ,

Just a quick translation challenge to myself …

Sa pengalyang asano / similena tado, ang
naraya: Namāng sam / kāryo nay taryankay
bengyon adāhalya. / Ya hemayong kiyisa
nasay adany’, ahalya, / marinas avanu-ngas.
Ang ningyon igān nay / nanding dijisu yona
nosānas kilisarya / nay sagoyamanas:
Sa layaya ban-ikan / tiyanyāng da-dikun
si telugtong tarela, / ya sapratos linyaye:
sapayas si sagoyong; / padangas si kondis’yong.
Nay sa tahanyo eda- / narān bengyamanya:
“Garanang nā SIMANJAS, / bayhiang bayhiyena:
Sa silvu gumo nā, / nay prisu, vāng si lita!”
Hangara ranyareng palung. / Le apanisareng
ahal-nama kebay, pray, / soya, litoya kayvay,
miday nernanyēa / eda-kiyanena nake.

Obvious from what’s printed in capitals, it’s a rendition of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley into Ayeri. Explanation, gloss etc. forthcoming in the Media section during the course of this week, I hope. Now I hate myself for neglecting to work on my term paper (15 pages due on the 15th, 0 words written so far) all evening for this… 😡

  • Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias.” Representative Poetry Online. Ed. Ian Lancashire. 3rd ed. U Toronto, 2009. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.

Plurals with -yam and -ya

Grammar Musings, , , , , , , , ,

So on the front page we have that word layamayajam. It means ‘for the readers’ and is composed like this:

laya + maya + ye + yam
read + AGT NMLZ + PL + DAT
‘for the readers’

And layamayayeyam is also what I first had on the front page. What’s long bothered me, though, is the abundance of [j] and that these little buggers can pile up occasionally, leading to words that may be quite a bit tongue-twisting, or at least awkward to say. Test for yourself: [ˌla.ja.ma.ˈja.je.jɑm]. See? This screams for dissimilation (at least in my ears it does), or some other morphophonetic process of removing a pronunciation hurdle. So, what could we do? —

  1. Go by analogy with the locative case marker -ya. In combination with the plural marker -ye, it changes to -ea, so we get -ye-ya → -yēa.

    ERGO: We can extend this to -ye-yam, leading to -yēam.

    PRO: This resembles my previous pronunciation habit of slurring /je.jɑm/ to something like /iːɑm/. It’s not perfectly phonemic spelling, but gets close.

    CONTRA: In a case like layamayayēam it’s still kind of awkward, I suppose. Also, -yēa and -yēam are pretty close.

  2. Go the route of dissimilation to the nearest similar-but-dissimilar-enough sound there is in the language.

    ERGO: [je] → [d͡ʒ] is a solution. We can do -ye-yam → -jyam. As [d͡ʒjɑm] is a little difficult to say, and the [j] is barely there anyway, we can even go as far as mutating that further to just -jam. Thus, we get layamayajam.

    PRO: Easier to pronounce, also shorter. Also, more synchronic irregularity triggered by morphophonetic processes, oh yeah! Also, there is no ending -jam so far, so it can’t be confused. Also, it’s dissimilar from -yēa.

    CONTRA: -jam doesn’t really look like -yeyam anymore. Also, now I need to figure out how to deal with this in ‘native’ spelling. Probably not at all, because native spelling is more morphemic/phonemic than phonetic.

In the end I decided for the second option. Now I only need to write that down in the grammar. However, this decision also poses the question what to do with other combinations, e.g. -yeas (patient animate) and -yeang (agent animate). Should they become -jas and -jang, respectively? Should I then also retrofit -yēa (locative) to -ja? Hm …

ADMIN: New old page

Changelog, , , , ,

I took lots of effort recently to shoehorn this site into WordPress, which replaces my old clumsy custom-built content management system. The contents of the site have been overhauled as well, most importantly the dictionary.

Granted, the tabular layout of the new dictionary may not be as pretty as the file-card records the database spat out earlier, however, this way, maintaining the code is much easier, as well as adjusting the output if fields in the database change. The advanced search of the dictionary now also offers a couple more options, e.g. searching with regular expressions. As the script that queries the dictionary database is now called dynamically by a jQuery function (Yes, you must have Javascript enabled in order to use the dictionary!), forms will not be empty anymore after the request is sent. The only thing the advanced search can’t handle so far is searching by multiple attributes of a word, that is, something along the lines of “Return all words that are 3rd person singular animate,” which would return a number of pronouns. At the time of writing this, building such a function with MySQL seems a little overkill, as you’d ideally do it with Temporary Tables or Views and I still need to read up on that. However, the advanced search feature of the old website couldn’t deal with this either.

The database behind the dictionary is now entirely managed offline on my own computer, where it is safe – hopefully – except for blunders caused by myself. I will occasionally synchronize it with the version that runs on my host’s server. As a means of security which I had overlooked before (shame on me!), the database that is on the web now is only readable and query strings are checked for stray apostrophes and inverted commas, as well as malicious keywords, such as “DROP”. As for the administration frontend, I was surprised how easy it was to construct it with Django only by abstraction from the tutorials on the Django website and with no previous knowledge of Python. No tedious handcrafting of HTML forms and PHP scripts to read and write data for hours on end, yay! Another invisible improvement is that whereas non-ASCII characters were stored as HTML entities (e.g. &#x0101; for ā) before, they are stored in plain Unicode format now, as I’ve finally found out why why why the heck Unicode would be stubbornly returned as just question marks and saved as weird things like Ä°, i.e. mistakenly iso-8859-1 encoded Unicode: I didn’t know you need to specify that the MySQL connection use utf-8. It took me 6 freaking years to find that out 😡

As the Daléian script as well as the vine-like script I devised years ago as an experiment are not actually used to write Ayeri, I’ve now removed them from this site. I might put them up again on a separate subpage, though. I’ve also rewritten the Alphabet page almost completely. Also, no inconsistently handwritten graphics there anymore. Yes, there is a font, however it does not yet work as I’d like it to because OpenType is extremely unfriendly towards custom alphabets that are not ciphers of existing alphabets, so I had to use a graphics program to get the diacritics over the consonant letters. I will not yet make a public release of it. Kudos to you if you manage to decipher the writing in the header image 🙂

The archive on the Media page now contains all years on the same page for your enjoyment. For fun, you may want to compare something very old with something very recent…

Another new thing I’ve included is a blog category on “Grammar musings”. There I will put entries that are about my latest thoughts on Ayeri grammar. So far I’ve only posted them on the ZBB, but posting them here will hopefully give you some insight into the process that is behind conlanging. This category will probably not be updated too often, though, as the language is now in a rather stable state.