Next (Evíendadhail)

Wordlist

aba "not" (negation)
ac "for"
acar "to see"
an "to come"
-an plural ending
anea "girl"
aru "child"
berena "accident, disaster, tragedy"
bretho "to demand"
calchusa "window" (lit "light opening")
cech "to tear, to rend"
coar "to eat"
coe "to"
cum interogative auxiliary
da "this, that" (acc dao)
damo "house, home, dwelling"
dar necessitive auxiliary ("must")
delad "rest, remains, leftovers" (sg noun)
doer obligative auxiliary ("should")
dogh "to spit"
-e forms patient nouns; mad "to give", made "gift".
ea- 2nd pl (subject and possessive prefix)
-em 1st pl (object suffix)
epoa "many"
-eth 3rd sg (object suffix)
eus "from"
gañ "to play"
gen "earth" (here ~ "ground")
h-, -h- definite article
-i- possessive infix
isam "thing"
lear "to sing"
lina "beautiful"
ma "what" (interogative)
magel "evil"
me- 1st pl (subject and possessive pronoun)
min "skin"
mir "to know"
misi "thru"
-n plural ending
nacha "root"
nasac "to own, to possess"
neoth "to attack"
nei "who, which (sg)"
ñasom "to entertain, to make happy"
ñil "to hide (tr)"
-o accusative ending
oa "and"
oeser "to search for" (thing sought for in the accusative)
oim "to tell"
ondu "(internal) organ"
poam "much"
sara "person, individual"
seuch "to strike, to hit"
se- 1st sg (subjective and possessive prefix)
si "but"
sor "with"
subh volitional auxiliary ("want to")
te- 3rd sg (subject and possessive prefix)
ten "to do"
teoseo "suddenly"
tul subjunctive auxiliary
-u- perfect infix
uth "because, since"

Meghean (*)

Andreas Johansson

Ring A

Oime Harui Magel

Eachum mir bherenao, nei seuchem?
Anea lina an coe medhamoo, ac dao, acar haruo.
Teñasom haruo; teghañ soreth oa lear aceth.
Si haru teoseo neoth haneao.
Haru cech mhino haineao, coar tehonduno, oa dogh dhelado misi chalchusao coe gheno.
Ma sedhoeur ten? Semir aba.
Eus da nachao, señil haruo, uth sara, nei tul oeser berenao oa tul subh nasac isamano epoao, dar bretho poam aba.

Story of the Evil Child

Do you know the tragedy that struck us?
A beautiful girl came to our house to see the child.
She made the child happy; she played with it and sang for it.
But suddenly the child attacked the girl.
The child tore her skin, ate her internal organs, and spit the remains thru the window onto the ground.
What should I have done? I do not know.
Therefore, I hid the child, because a person, who would seek tragedy and want to possess many things, must not demand much.

Some notes on grammar

Well, if my first relay text was strange and my second poetic, this one is disturbing. It's quite coherent, except the end, which is quite insane.

I'm doing this from a mainly written perspective - if you want to know how the stuff actually sounds, check out my webpage at http://andjo.free.fr/conlang/meghean.html. The webpage might also be helpful by providing more examples of how stuff actually work than this somewhat condensed grammatical sketch does.

Oh, well, the language here is, then, Meghean, an accusative language with SVO, NG, NA syntax. What you really need to translate it is the wordlist at the end of this mail, but let's summarize grammar first:

Nouns

The trickiest thing about Meghean nouns is the definite form; when a noun begins in a vowel, it is simply indicated by a prefix h-, eg uran "sun", huran "the sun", but when it begins with a consonant, the h is placed after the first consonant, eg can "lord", chan "the lord" (corresponding to consonant mutation in speech [kan] vs [xan]). You'll notice that no uninflected nouns begin in h- or Ch-, so spotting a definite noun should be fairly easy.

The plural is formed by -an after consonants and -n after vowels. It gets trickier when the final conant is a spirant, but there doesn't seem to be any such plural nouns in this text. The accusative is formed with the ending -o. Nouns governed by prepositions are always in the accusative.

The possessive is formed by infixing -i- in the stressed syllable; chan "the lord", chain "the lord's". In polysyllabic noun stems, it's not predictible which syllable is stressed, nor is stress indicated orthographically, but I don't think that should be causing any problems. To a first approximation, any word containing a diphthong in -i is a possessive, the only exception in this text being nei. A possessive governing an accusative noun will echo the accusative ending (Suffixaufnahme).

Adjectives

About the only thing to note about adjectives is that they follow their noun, and that they echo any accusative ending on their noun. They don't agree in number, definiteness or possessiveness.

Verbs

The chief distinction in the Meghean verbal system is (unmarked) imperfect vs perfect, marked by an infix -u- in the stressed syllable. There being no real tense marking, imperfects have to be translated as English present or past depending on context. The unmarked form also serves as infinitive, and as imperative (no imperatives in this text, however).

Auxiliaries are important in Meghean. They essentially usurp the main verb's syntactic slot, incl any pronominal affixes (see below), while the main verb is left as an uninflected infinitive following the finite auxiliary. Multiple auxiliaries can be used with the same verb, creating Germanic-style verbal complexes of one finite verb followed by a row of infinitives.

Pronouns

Meghean personal pronouns take the form of verbal affixes; subject ones are prefixes, and object ones are suffixes. The forms are:

subject pronouns object pronouns
. sg pl . sg pl
1st se- me- 1st -es -em
2nd ra- ea- 2nd -ar -ii
3rd te- cha- 3rd -eth -ach

Attaching a subject pronoun turns initial p, b, t, d, c, g into ph, bh, th, dh, ch, gh in the verb stem. Similarly, if the verb stem begins in a, o, or u, an -h- is inserted between the pronoun and the stem.

Note that the object pronouns are also used with prepositions.

Possessive pronouns are formally identical to subject ones, except only that they, of course, attach to nouns rather than verbs.

Other stuff to know

Eus da nachao is an idiomatic expression signifying "for this reason, because of this".