Season's Greetings!
The turn of the year seemed an appropriate time to retrun to this long-neglected blog. This year, for the first time, I participated in the Conlang Card Exchange, in which conlangers send holiday cards in their languages and their scripts to other conlangers. I received five addresses: three were in the US, but the fourth and fifth were in China and Finland, respectively. My hesitation in previous years to participate stemmed not only from disorganization, but also the lack of a proper writing system with which to write Siye. For many years I had a placeholder system, based on Batak, which was superceded two years ago by a system derived (in the real world) from stick drawings of semaphore CV syllables. It has taken two years for the system to become sufficiently organic for me to be comfortable to use it in a substantial manner.
So I signed up for the Conlang Card Exchange and gave careful thought to the phrasing and orthography of a winter solstice greeting in Siye. The phrase I settled upon was
Pe Pomi Luno or, rather Pe(i) Pomi Lu(i)no(e).
The first thing one must know about Keno Siye, the writing system of the Simakim and the Simayamka, is that it is a syllabary with a phonetic-semantic component. The syllabary distinguishes between initial and non-initial syllables, with the exception of w and s. Initial syllables are represented by a capital Roman letter, while all others, including the two series which do not distinguish initial and non-initial, are represented by a lower case Roman letter. The phonetic-semantic component comes from the modifications of the syllabary characters as a reaction to vowel contraction, but some of those contractions contained grammar which now was invisible.
Pe(i) is the vocative case of the second person singular, identical in pronunciation to the nominative Pe and the adjective Pe(e). The basic character Pe is modified by (i), creating a character homophonous to Pe. The next word, Pomi, consists of two characters, Po and mi, but is unremarkable. The last word of the greeting, Lu(i)no(e), is more interesting. Lu(i)no is the Siye word for a traditional temple, derived from Lu Ino, 'the place of the spirits', which passed through a trisyllabic stage of Lu.i.no before becoming bisyllabic. The first syllable of the word is written as Lu modified by (i), while the second syllable is written as no. The combination of this two syllables, however, are treated as a single word, and the religious domain provides a bulwark against potential simplification to Luno. The third word of the greeting is not Lu(i)no, but Lu(i)no(e). Whence comes this (e)? It is the remnant of -e, an alternate form of the Genitive -ne.-e developed into the adjectival suffix, but when it appeared adjacent to stronger vowels, it was absorbed, resulting in homophones of the noun and the adjective which are nonetheless written differently.
In the New Year, I plan to write in more detail about the composition and analysis of Keno Siye, but until that time, Peka(i) Pomi Lu(i)no(e) - To All, Happy Temple Day!
So I signed up for the Conlang Card Exchange and gave careful thought to the phrasing and orthography of a winter solstice greeting in Siye. The phrase I settled upon was
Pe Pomi Luno or, rather Pe(i) Pomi Lu(i)no(e).
The first thing one must know about Keno Siye, the writing system of the Simakim and the Simayamka, is that it is a syllabary with a phonetic-semantic component. The syllabary distinguishes between initial and non-initial syllables, with the exception of w and s. Initial syllables are represented by a capital Roman letter, while all others, including the two series which do not distinguish initial and non-initial, are represented by a lower case Roman letter. The phonetic-semantic component comes from the modifications of the syllabary characters as a reaction to vowel contraction, but some of those contractions contained grammar which now was invisible.
Pe(i) is the vocative case of the second person singular, identical in pronunciation to the nominative Pe and the adjective Pe(e). The basic character Pe is modified by (i), creating a character homophonous to Pe. The next word, Pomi, consists of two characters, Po and mi, but is unremarkable. The last word of the greeting, Lu(i)no(e), is more interesting. Lu(i)no is the Siye word for a traditional temple, derived from Lu Ino, 'the place of the spirits', which passed through a trisyllabic stage of Lu.i.no before becoming bisyllabic. The first syllable of the word is written as Lu modified by (i), while the second syllable is written as no. The combination of this two syllables, however, are treated as a single word, and the religious domain provides a bulwark against potential simplification to Luno. The third word of the greeting is not Lu(i)no, but Lu(i)no(e). Whence comes this (e)? It is the remnant of -e, an alternate form of the Genitive -ne.-e developed into the adjectival suffix, but when it appeared adjacent to stronger vowels, it was absorbed, resulting in homophones of the noun and the adjective which are nonetheless written differently.
In the New Year, I plan to write in more detail about the composition and analysis of Keno Siye, but until that time, Peka(i) Pomi Lu(i)no(e) - To All, Happy Temple Day!