Verbs - 2

Going against something I said previously, I'm adding distinct Infinitive form for Verbs.

These endings are -vd for Transitive Verbs and -ft for Intransitive Verbs.

Despite this, the "Dictionary Forms" are still the Present Tense forms.

I intend to implement the Infinitive in much the way Esperanto uses it, possibly including Esperanto's "-ado" forms.

I've also added the verb, ɪnt, which means "to be able" and functions like the Esperanto povi. ɪnd means "to enable."

Noun Miscellanea - 1

In this, I'm going to talk about some Noun things that I don't have 100% figured out/don't have enough done to make a whole post.

Quantitative vs Non-Quantitative

The current plan is to distinguish between Quantitative and Non-Quantitative Nouns in a method similar to English. Relevant words (Much/Many, Less/Fewer, More/[Other More]) will each have a distinct word and can be modified by correlative prefixes (in cases where that would be a thing).
My current plan is that Non-Quantitative have no distinguishing features, but may be more likely to look like plural nouns (that is, they might look like they're already plural).

Gendered Nouns

All nouns are neuter by default, but person-nouns (and animals, I guess, if you want), such as "sibling," "parent," and "cousin," and any others you might like, can be made into gendered forms ("sister," "mom") with the addition of a prefix.

Originally, the way this worked was [gender prefix] + [person root] (sister = [feminine prefix] + [sibling root]) and then the neuter was [person root] + dal. This has a nice artistry to it, but isn't very efficient, and I don't like it.

Further, familial nouns also need diminutive forms. Not sure how I'm going to bring all this together...

Syllabic Consonants and the Schwa

One last thing I guess I forgot to discuss is Syllabic Consonants.

I say Syllabic Consonant, but really I sort of mean "Consonants preceded by a schwa" (/ə/). I can't really tell the difference

In Latin script, Syllabic Consonants are distinguished by being upper case, as in lRim ("trees").

Syllabic Consonants are rarely morphemic; instead, they are a transformation of a regular Consonant caused by difficulty in pronunciation. For example: lim means "Tree" and (following normal pluralization rules) "lrim" should mean "trees." However, Elessic doesn't like having to pronounce word-initial〈lr〉, so the "r" is made syllabic. Therefore, the plural of lim is lRim.

"R" is the most common, since its use in pluralization causes it to wind up in hard-to-pronounce places.

Elessic also doesn't like "l[consonant]l." Most often, this is solved by making the second "l" syllabic. An example of this is in the word stalkLar ("death knight," a type of monster). stal means "death" and klar means "knight," but "stalklar" is difficult/unpleasant to pronounce.

Adjectives - 2

Adjectives are super important in Elessic, because Elves like to be descriptive and specific. This post will have a lot to do with Relational Adjectives, but there's something else I want to address alongside that:

In English, you can say "That smells good," or "I smell that." It's the same verb with two functions.

In Esperanto, you can say "Tiu odoras bone," or "Mi flaras tion." Different verbs for the two.

Elessic lacks "to be" verbs beyond sa (don't hold me to that), instead using sa and an Adjective. So, rather than saying "That smells good," you say, "That is good-smelling" which is awkward in English, but Elessic forms it in a more streamlined way.

tedos sa giner.

te- (that)
-dos (thing)
sa (is)
gin- (good [quality])
-er ([forms smells-like adjectives])

So, the "sensory" suffixes are as follows:

-ai - looks-like
-bwe - tastes-like
-er - smells-like
-ho - feels-like (intuition)
-sey - feels-like (physically)
-wa - sounds-like

Look familiar? No? Oh, I just realized I haven't released the post about special suffixes. Hold on.

Okay, that's out now. This is an example of Relational Adjectives, where a suffix is employed to indicate how the Noun that is used to form the Adjective describes the Noun being described.

Orthography - 1

This will just be an overview post; Later, I'll make more in-depth posts about the individual writing systems.

Elessic has four native writing systems, but (unlike Japanese), it uses only one at a time, and two of them are rarely used at all.

kyarɪþ

Kyarith ("Earth Script") is a rune-like alphabet favored by the Wood Elves for the ease with which it can be carved into hard materials. High Elves dislike for aesthetic reasons. I have this one planned out, but I don't ever do anything with it.

gwɪlɪþ

Gwilith ("Cloud Script") is an abugida favored by the High Elves for its beauty and efficiency. It is the main writing system that I focus on, and I've spent quite a bit of time refining it, including adding ligatures. Each glyph is composed of individual pieces which indicate the Place, Manner, and Voice of the sound its represents. I'll definitely do a tutorial on how to write in it... some day.

pazɪþ

Pazith ("Fire Script") is an abugida visibly similar to Gwilith, but more streamlined and with less variety of shape. It's used as short-hand, and in practicing magic. I planned this out on a napkin once, but didn't care enough to hang on to it. Mechanically, it's identical to Gwlitith, just with the "pieces" replaced with more efficient (if less immediately legible).

delɪþ

Delith ("Water Script") is still almost entirely unplanned as of yet. All I know is it will be inefficient, written vertically (as opposed to LTR like the rest of the systems), and used primarily in art for its beauty.

The Syllabic Spacer

This is something I hadn't gotten around to, yet, mostly because it doesn't come up all that often.

When I went through the language's Phonology, at the bottom was a glyph, ', which I defined as the "Syllabic Spacer."

' comes up only very rarely, and I at one point tried to remove it from the language, but eventually I decided to keep it around.

' indicates that the two adjacent sounds are part of separate syllables. For example, the "people group/race" suffix, a'i is two syllables ("ah.ee"). Another example is sa'in (a word for "Moon"), which is pronounced as two syllables, unlike sain. So far, most instances of ' occur between a and i, but some prefixes, such as e' (forms imperative verbs), use it to add a layer of separation between themselves and the word they modify.

' has a unique representation in non-Latin Elessic representations, which I'll get to when I do orthography (eventually).

Questions - 1

This one's pretty short, I guess, but oh well.

Elessic forms questions using Interrogative Particles, like the Esperanto "ĉu," or the Japanese "ka."

Like "ĉu," Elessic Interrogative Particles go at the beginning of the sentence and need no alteration to syntax.

Elessic has three Interrogative Particles:

dast - Forms a question with no special indication of an expected answer, or a non-yes/no.
dɪst - Forms a question that the speaker thinks (or hopes) will be answered with "No."
dust - Forms a question that the speaker thinks (or hopes) will be answered with "Yes."

The variation is inspired by something I read about forming questions in Latin.

One can think of the differences as this:

"Are you mad?"
"You're not mad, are you?"
"You're mad, aren't you?"

Subtle, but important. This also helps disambiguate the old terror of language-learning, negatively-formed questions. Rather than tangling with negatives to indicate a desired or expected response, it's all reduced to the neutral form ("Are you mad?"), with the other flavorings being implied, but not grammatically altering.

The particles are probably related to the archaic English "dost," as in "dost thou?" But they also are descended from bisyllabic forms which I shortened because I decided I didn't need two syllables to ask a question.

As for words like "whether," I'll get to those later.