I WROTE SHIT. AND THERE ARE IKE THREE OTHER PEOPLE BESIDES MORVEN HERE WHO MIGHT WANT TO SEE IT. It's a Star Wars fic. With Mando Jame and Jedi Tori.
i forget about kintsugi for a little while and come back to a buffet of sweet language ramblings cool
please help me all i do now is play pokemon and make kencyrath aus AND YET STILL NOT CATCH UP. I AM THREE FOURTHS OF THE WAY DONE WITH SIX THOUGH. I'M GETTING THERE. Also yes language ramblings. Not sure what else to do with it right now though. Probably ignore it for a bit until I decide oh yes this is now what we must do. And instead focus on things like LET'S MANDO JAME POEM YES. Because if we need anything in our lives it is her now Mandalorian ass flailing her brother's lightsaber wildly and with no actual sense in verse form.
Also Tori gets exactly one headpat for being a somewhat good boy in the book. But only one. Because he is still being a huge brat.
Ok so I got bored and decided to draw some syntax trees for the language. Morpheme and syllable trees will follow soon enough too. So I guess the first explanation is what the fuck a syntax tree even is. And it's basically just that? A visual tree that breaks down a sentence into smaller and smaller bits until we've got the grammar of the sentence all puzzled out. It makes showing syntax easier and is fun to do besides. Also can be a fun tool with learning languages! So the way they work is you start with a sentence. A nice whole sentence. Then you break this up into clauses. Then the clauses into phrases. Then the phrases into individual parts of speech. Then those parts into smaller syntactic elements. And then finally into words and morphemes. Let's look at a very basic sentence and tree first to see how this looks: Very basic sentence as I said. So it is broken into a clause, then a verb phrase, then a verb and a noun, and then the verb and noun senetha and Jame. So what the fuck is a clause? Well it's the biggest category of grammatical organization besides the sentence. If our sentence is the whole deal, the clause is a smaller part of that deal under which all the actual chaos occurs. We only have one clause here so we don't have to worry about it too much. We'll get into what happens when you start having multiple clauses soon. So after that we have our verb phrase, the vp. A phrase is a group of words that basically all work together to perform a grammatic thing. So our verb phrase here is made up of a verb and a noun. The phrase is telling us that a verb (senetha) is being performed by a noun (Jame). You can swap out any of these parts with more parts. Or even add on new parts! But the important part is that this chunk is telling us what the action is and who is doing that action. Hence it is the verb phrase. However we only have one phrase here. So what happens when you have multiple phrases of multiple types? Well you get something like this: So we have our sentence here which we'll say means "Jame dances with Tori" in English with mah being our word for with here. Now again we have a singular clause. But we do have multiple phrases. A verb phrase and a noun phrase. Now a noun phrase just tells us about a noun. It tells us what the noun is, how many nouns there are, and little things like that. In this case our verb phrase is still a verb and a noun. Our noun phrase though consists of a conjunction (mah) and a noun (Tori). So basically it is telling us that this noun is happening in conjunction with something else. In this case the subject of our verb phrase, Jame. But what about that sentence you used earlier Aon where the fuck is that. It is here: And this chart is here displaying two new things. One that there are more kinds of phrases besides verb and noun phrases. We have things like this here prepositional phrase, along with things like the adjective phrase and so on. We also see that a verb phrase can be broken into a noun phrase instead of just a noun. Or, in other words, you can have phrases nested within other phrases. So we have our clause which in this case is just the whole sentence. And we break this into two phrases. A verb phrase of Senetha Arknorthan and a prepositional phrase of li Gothregor. Let's look at that later one first since it's just one thing. So we have our prepositional phrase which breaks into a preposition and a noun. A preposition is just a word that tells us when and where a noun is. So words like "at" and "on" are prepositions of place, they tell us where the noun is or where action is happening. So "on the box" is a prepositional phrase in English. And as we learned earlier Kens has a preposition of time "isar". We have in our prepositional phrase the preposition li (in) and the noun Gothregor. So something is happening within Gothregor. Which leads us to that verb phrase there. It breaks down into a verb and a noun phrase and oh dear god that looks horrifying. But really it's no worse than our first sentence. We're just adding a few things onto our noun to tell us more about the noun. So we put the definite article on it and the plural suffix. So we're pointing right at the Knorths and going "You! You're the target!" and we're also pointing out that there are multiple Knorths involved. But we still have our one noun and our one verb. Just instead of just Jame dancing now it's the Knorths dancing. But what happens when we start adding on multiple clauses? How would you have multiple clauses? Well one way it can turn out is this: Holy fucking shit what is that. Well again we have our sentence. Which is broken down into the clause level of an independent clause and a dependent clause. The independent clause is just that. It's independent. Its own man. It can be a sentence by itself. The dependent clause? Not so much. It's telling us a lot of the same things that an independent clauses does, but it's not a sentence. You need to tack it onto an independent clause to make it not a bullshit sentence fragment. So then we notice something. Namely that our independent clause is just the sentence from earlier. We've seen this. We know the Knorths are dancing and that they're dancing in Gothregor. That's not actually that horrifying. It's just the same thing. A verb phrase and a prepositional phrase, which break down into a verb and a noun phrase and a preposition and a noun respectively. And the other half of the tree isn't that bad either. It's just a noun phrase. One that is made up of a conjunction, a determinate, and a noun phrase. And that noun phrase is a noun and a determinate. This mess all together is telling us that while the Knorths are dancing in Gothregor the Randiran aren't. But "But not Randiran" isn't a sentence by itself. It's an idea, yes. It implies something about what the Randir are doing. But it's not telling us what they're not doing. If we added on a verb here somewhere instead of just having an implicit verb we could have a clause that would stand all by itself. But because we don't have, say, lisenetha randiran, or some such madness we don't have a sentence. We just have a noun and the action that they're implied to not be doing based on the clause before this one. So these are the syntax trees. You can do this with any language and you can and do get very insane the deeper and deeper you go into constructions. You can end up with these massive trees far, far more horrifying than that last one I have here. But on a basic level this is how they generally function. (also yes i know i added an extra clause in that last one because i am a dork. i meant to write sentence and then branch that into the clauses)
O_____O where were you when they tried to teach me this shit in grade school this is MUCH easier to understand and its a fucking fictional language instead of my native language ...maybe because you actually explained what each part was and why :?
That might be part of it, yeah? There's a lot of individual little parts and the shit gets very confused very fast. I find it's helpful to have a few trees, with progressive levels of complexity. To basically explain things bit by bit and getting people acquainted to having more toys to play with. You also do need to explain each part. Even if you're teaching adults who are fluent in a language you need to explain them all. So like you can't just assume that people know what a verb is or actually does. Also it being a fictional language I feel makes it fun? It's why I like to present Tolkien as a way to learn linguistics if people are into him. The fun of language comes from lots of places and it's different with people but fiction tends to be a really good way to get people into it. A lot of people don't want to learn about what part of speech "the" is, but they might be interested in learning how to decode scripts through Magic the Gathering or Steven Universe. It's why I really like when people make linguistics based games. It's a fun way of teaching people concepts that otherwise might be boring school work. So yeah it's not your native language but you do like those wacky Knorth kids.
yea pretty much also thanks to you not only explaining what the thing does but the actual official word for it i was able to look up and find the things that didn't make sense in school apply what you taught me here finally get what the fuck i was supposed to be taught the first time it was introduced in school so yay learning! also i think i noticed a thing earlier. you have senetha as "to dance" and it looked like first part was tied to singing as well, what was the second part? cause the -thar bit was a martial art and i could see it being something like "singing with body" or something but i wanted to know if that was what you were going for or if i missed a thing
That is kind of what I was going for, yes. With treating "sen" by itself as voice or song. The second half I don't really have figured out, save that it might refer to bodily based arts. If not martial ones like -thar would. And with syntax shit yaaaaay. The terminology is kind of a pain in the ass and we get a bit overly dense with it I think but it is useful and important to learn. Let's you look things up and also talk easier with others about the thing. Jargon has its uses.
yeah jargon is useful, just not without some kind of explanation of what it means now that i've GOT that its actually something i can use and understand and even communicate Ooo i actually spotted a thing, nice :D
YOU DID YES. I AM HAPPY YOU DID. Little details like that are part of why I really like morphology. You learn interesting things about a culture based on what their words are and how they use them. Also I suppose this is as good a time as any to ask what the hell you personally picture in your head whenever senetha and senethar are brought up. I personally tend to think of Thai masked drama and muay thai. Exceptionally stylized though because JAME IS JUST THAT COOL OK. So like this basically.
OOO! THOUGHT HAPPENED! MUST SHARE! i think you are REALLY on to something regarding "sen" in senetha being some form of voice/song/speech because there was that one point where jame reconstructed a rune from memory (i believe it was when she blew the windows out with wind) by imagining the associated senetha forms. and it would explain why they use it in the temple too. its not only a way to guide the power from that, its a way to communicate with their god! also forgot if you had the -i in the lexicon yet or not. it would mean something like "master of" or "teacher" since jame calls the one who taught her the senetha her senethari the same way you see people use the word sensei #im not kidding #i jumped out of bed to type this #who needs sleep when you have nerdiness to do
hmmm. my view of it has changed over time. for a long while i only had the first book, then i found the second and third and reread those a few times, and finally discovered the rest of the series. so my view went from the relative realism of the first book to the full on anime shit in the later ones (which i don't have a problem with). i've always thought of it as kind of a 4-in-1 martial arts set rather than a single martial art. so prolly something like mixed martial arts in that regard. like earth moving is for one type of fighting, water flowing for another. that kind of thing. although to be honest, with the inclusion of actual magic in the effects, and watching avatar the last airbender, some of the elemental-bender stuff has made it into my imagining of it as well. like earth-moving being more grounded and slower and less acrobatic, while stuff like wind blowing or fire leaping would be the most jumpy and flippy and twisty and fast. overall im thinking its very much Not Human. that its superhuman, alien, and yet also primal in its intensity (it is elemental in nature after all). i mean kencyr are cat-people after all so its gonna include higher jumps, farther leaps, more flexibility, more ferocity, and more grace. but they're also millennia-old warrior culture so its gonna be fairly efficient (like jame said about tori's fighting at the cataracts) with less floweryness, at least in the combat form. but its also dance-like enough that you only need minor differences in position to switch between the dance and combat forms (jame said something about this for a leg hook). and since it is elemental inspired to the point of mindsets changing ones actual flexibility and manefesting magical effects like flight or water out of nowhere there's prolly some of that in there too. like movements that are less humanoid and more elemental or at least creatures tied to those elements (i believe it was shade that was described as literally moving like a fish during the water kata) so something very smooth, very efficient, pretty damn acrobatic, pretty damn flexible, and something that humans are basically incapable of at the higher end of difficulty (i mean, hell, even some of the kencyr couldn't pull off the more difficult katas without being part shapeshifter) i don't really know of a single martial art that really exists that is like that. sometimes i'll see a single move that looks like it might be something like the senetha, but not a single style. yes, freerunning makes everything better :3 that and you can't tell me that jame, trained in superhuman cat martial arts, trained as a thief, living in tai-tastigon for a little over a year, DIDN'T do some serious freerunning shit while she was there
okay so did some looking and found some more info (with video examples!) of what i think is going on with senetha/senethar elements of real world martial arts that i think are similar to senetha elements: taekwondo kicks = fire leaping aikido throws/redirection = earth moving overall feel of efficiency of most karate styles (maybe because everything is a possible weapon: knees, elbows, open palm, closed palm, side of arm, that kind of thing), maybe even the higher end of earth moving since less kicking/leaping and kicks are generally lower jeet kune do tends to have the overall feeling of efficiency and flow i imagine senethar to have. prolly not water style though, or at least not solely water. maybe some kind of boiling water style, like where fire and water styles meet. but im thinking more overall feeling rather than specific style of senetha filipino kali (especially all the circular movement and spinning, especially with weapons) = part of wind blowing? or maybe middleing water flowing? definitely has some capoeira elements = water flowing (or even basic wind-blowing), im leaning basic stuff is more water themed, more acrobatic stuff is more wind themed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-pkMJHCoxM tai chi's grace for some of what water flowing would feel like (there's a part in the linked vid about 3 minutes in that is almost exactly like the water flowing kata scene in the books) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y7_s2ZPX6Y drunken kung fu = more water flowing (specifically the flexibility and smoothness of motion, maybe even some of the unpredictability) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELAqMiQGups baguazhang (especially the stuff around 2:30) = more water flowing elements, maybe some earth moving elements https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ZHzsNP_O0 for the magical elements im thinking one end is full on avatar elemental bending and the other end is more house of flying daggers/crouching tiger, hidden dragon stuff
Yeah I tend to picture muay thai because that's what I know best. And I am fuck awful at mental images. Picturing things in my head is very hard for me even when a writer describes it! It's neat to see how thought your thing is! Also the sheer power of word and voice compared to a very similar sort of power with dance is in fact why I chose that meaning for the root sen. And yeah i forgot final i. Which I should use in an explanation of how morpheme trees work. And the breaking down of morphemes. Wherein you will learn that the word unspoken consists of three distinct morphemic parts, only one of which can stand alone.
It's now morpheme tree time. What the fuck is a morpheme? It is the ABSOLUTE smallest unit of semantic or grammatical meaning. So basically it either tells us what something is or something about what this something is. Like everything else we use trees to help us get through the breaking down of them so let's look at our first trees: Ok so our first tree to the left isn't much of a tree is it? It's just one thing! Namely "sen". But because sen is by itself we learn something about sen. Namely that it's a root, or a freestanding morpheme. You can use sen just by itself and it's still a word. Hence it being free. But you can use sen to make a bunch of different words by tacking other shit to it or by morphing pieces of it. Hence it being a root. We have also learned that sen's morphemic meaning is sound or voice. Very handy info. The second tree shows that oh no these things can begin to stack. Now we have two morphemes! One is free and the other bound. We know what sen's deal is so let's look at that "tha". First off by being bound we know that tha cannot appear by itself. It's not its own independent word and it cannot have other things added to it in quite the same fashion as sen can so it's not a root. Bound morphemes are a bit more complicated though because there are two kinds of the bastards. Our tha here is derivational. Which basically means you're just changing the semantic or part of speech a word is. So sen is a noun right? Voices and sounds are things. But with tha we've taken our noun and turned it into a verb. More than that we've turned it into a particular type of verb, specifically one that refers to all body movement based art. I said there are two kinds of bound morphemes though so let's see that other one: Alright. So with the tree on the left we have the word Knorthan which has two morphemes. The first is pretty self explanatory. It's a free morpheme that is Knorth. It refers to people in the Knorth family. Pretty easy shit. Our second morpheme though is where the new bit comes in. You probably recall that "an" pluralizes most nouns in Kens. Which is good because that tells us exactly what an inflectional morpheme is. It's morpheme that changes the tense of a word. So person, number, mood, aspect, and so on. If it changes any of that and we still have what is essentially the same word we have an inflection. Derivations make new words, inflections make old words more flexible. And with our second tree there we see that you can attach both kinds of bound morphemes to a free morpheme. We've tacked on the derivational "jo", which means small. And with Kens in particular it gives us the child form of a word. So we now have a Knorth child. We also have the inflectional "an" though so we know that we don't have one Knorth kid. We have Knorth kids. Which leads us to our last chart. Bound morphemes within bound morphemes: Behold the most AAAAA inducing of the three charts I drew. Again let's look at the left hand tree first. It looks pretty similar to the senetha tree from earlier but there's one extra thing going on. Namely that thar itself consists of two morphemes. Or rather the "r" morpheme is pretty fucking useless by itself UNLESS it is preceded by our "tha" morpheme. They're still two separate morphemes! It's just a bit easier if we break it down like this because you can't just tack "r" at the end of, say, Joknorth and expect to turn a Knorth kid into a martial art. That's not how that shit works. It's very specifically bound to "tha" and it turns our bodily art into a specifically martial one. Which leads to the next tree. Same as the first but we just put on one last morpheme, the final "i". It's a bound morpheme that turns our art from a verb back into a noun. A specific kind of noun too. An agent. So a senethari is someone who does senethar. But specifically it refers to a teacher of the art. Which again makes it a derivational morpheme because it's changing the part of speech that senethar was and senethar was already changing the part of speech that sen was. So we make a noun into a verb and then a verb back into a noun. And if we really, REALLY felt like it we could take all this and then make it an adjective. Now from this we learn something about how Kens makes words in general. Namely that it really, really, really likes tacking shit onto the end of words. These little extra bits at the end are called suffixes and when we add them we say that we've appended the word. We've also learned that Kens can add bits to the fronts of words too and those are the prefixes. We can also make some guesses about general Kens word building from this, though they might not be right given how small our sample size is. We can theorize that morphemes that turn nouns into verbs come at the ends of words, or at least a good chunk of them. We can also theorize that morphemes that turn verbalized nouns into new nouns again come in suffix form. At least some of them. We can also make a guess that more adjectival morphemes are tacked onto the front of words in Kens. So if we wanted to make a hypothetical word that meant "Darkling Knorth child" we could use our little ruleset here to decide that Torjoknorth might be a valid word. Except that's really kind of fucking ugly isn't it? So maybe we just stick with Gothknorth and giggle to ourselves about how goth Jame is. They're both pretty ugly though so let's not use them. It's not really should we use them, but more with how Kens makes words COULD we use them. And the answer is that yes we could. We could probably even turn it into a verb if we wanted to. I've no fucking idea what Torjoknortha would even be but wow could we make that horrible mess of a word.
Syllable trees will come soon. I am still having issues thinking about how to describe valid phoneme rules though. That second thing in particular is important because it gives us the other half of our ruleset when making words. It's not just "Can I put these together based on the morphological rules of Kens?", it's also "Ok so assuming I do put these together based on the morphological rules, how does that interact with the phonological rules? Do any sounds change? Are any dropped? Or can I just not do it at all because Kens said it was too ugly?"
so its kind of like theoretical plurals of mouse = meese kind of thing theoretically possible within the rules of the english language (one of the many sets its stolen from other languages), but considered too ugly/silly to use seriously that and we already have a perfectly fine plural for it derived elsewhere like that?
Theoretically exactly like that yeap! Though with mouse I can't recall if that's a matter of it not actually falling into the set of words that pluralize like that? Like dwarf and scarf pluralized as dwarfs and scarves because of where the words came from. So while Tolkien ADORED dwarves as a plural he was aware that etymologically it was fucked. Kind of like the whole octopi issue where we're applying Latin plurals to a Greek word for some fucking reason. But these incorrect plurals can, through usage, become correct. So dwarves is now correct even though it's not etymologically sound. Same with octopi, octopuses, and octopodes.
