Not really much happened this week in terms of the project this week, so we’ll just go through the evidence that we have for some things. Specifically, I’ll give you all the evidence for the noun grammar which we talked about last update.
We currently have 11 nouns in our dictionary. These are the forms that we see them in:
Kala:
- kala
- kalakma
- kalala
- kalamado(s)
- kalakmado
- kalak
- kalao
Kere:
- kerektis
Kik:
- kika
Citari:
- citari
- citarin (maybe it’s actually citarim and we heard it wrong?)
Mane:
- manema
Me:
- me
- mea
- merma (?)
- mera (?)
- mele (?)
- mes (?)
- cemele (?)
Me is such a short word, it’s hard to tell whether something that has “me” in it is “me” with a prefix or suffix, or just its own word.
Goan:
- goan
- cegoan
Mini:
- minima
Tros:
- tros
- trosje
As you can see, some of those words only every show up with a suffix, and never plain on their own. This is still acceptable in our opinion, since if it makes sense for a suffix to be there, it can safely be assumed that it is a word with a suffix.
Another thing that we’ve decided to accept is the infamous “Logical, but not attested”. We have a very small sample of voice clips to analyse, so if we find a pattern that seems to hold, but we don’t see every possible instance of it, we’ll accept it. For example, if we see that many of the third person inanimate verb endings can be changed into animate by putting an m at the start, then we’ll apply that to all the third person endings that we have, even if we don’t see every single third person ending both plain and with the m. We simply do not have enough voice lines to insist on only confirming things when we see it in the voice lines.
We are still immensely confused about the noun morphology problem. There I’ve laid out all the noun morphology we can see. We have no idea what to do with it. Every night we gather around a crackling fire far within woods. Amidst the trees gazing down at us, we look upwards towards the sky; the endless void staring into us with pity. Sparks fly and dance about us as we join hands, slowly and solemnly, then with the same unbridled stillness chant towards the heavens our saviour’s name. “Db.” Where is he, to grace us with his wisdom: his unending knowledge unrivalled by us mere mortals; to grant unto us the mere gift of his presence; to look pitifully at our problems and make of them but a simple answer. Where is he, the lord of going back and changing outdated aspects of the project. The grand god of grammatical analysis; one who’s judgement falls harsh and piercing – striking through our confusion and impaling our hearts as we sit lost for words. Where is he. The one who we need most. “Where is he”, we bellow in chorus up towards the heavens above. The fire sputters and falters. The leaves around us rustle a soft lulling noise in the breeze. Gazing towards the sky, we stand in a circle awaiting an answer from our great db. He is no where to be found. The fire twists and tires before snuffing itself out. Is it too late? We did not appreciate his gifts in the past, claiming his skepticism as damaging. Is this but retribution for our disgratitude? We chant a final time, in vain hopelessness and harrowing fear. “O db, we beckon for thine aid; grace us, great God of Hallowspeak, please, with thy divine intelligence”
“Please db. We need you now.”
“Db, the greatest member of the Hallowspeak Team.”
“Save us.”