Is it ridiculous for me
Is it ridiculous for me to have dialects and archaic forms in the language that I’m inventing for my private use? In language that are fictional rather than spontaneous, dialects and archaic forms are to be encouraged, for the history of a language is the history of a people, and with any luck a story will fall out inevitably from a properly-completed language. In my other one, the pronoun-heavy one that I’m inventing, the habit of leaving off the final vowels of words, particularly of verbs, is the mark of a tradesman or city-dweller. Speech that emphasizes the sound "i" sounds feminine, speech that emphasizes the sound "ar-" sounds masculine. A court accent is one that gives nearly equal weight to all syllables.
But now Kaetsprak seems to be developing internal variations in spelling and pronunciation that seems to call for an explanation as dialect, or at best as poetical forms. In forming feminine past verbs, for instance- "credoa", she believes, "credoadt" she believed - I’ve noticed a marked tendency, often but not always for metrical reasons, to drop the "o" and say simply "credadt". There are other things too.
And while I’m on the subject of my language, I will say just one more thing. It’s about my conjuctions. There are three words for "and": et, im, and kai. Et is, so to speak, the synthetic conjuction, joining two things that are disparate in nature, or in the respect in which the speaker is using them. Im, on the other hand, is the analytic conjuction, joining two things which naturally come together. Kai means something more like "too" or "also", but is used just like "and" sytactically, with the addition of being able to be placed at the end of a word or a sentence. Patre surpare kai, or as the Latins say, Pater filioque.
I spent much of the day drawing maps of the island on which Marken’o is spoken. I didn’t intend it to be the language of an actual place. It just happened that way, based on how the language grew.
May 28th, 2002 at 10:25 pm