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far-from-earth In reply to ImaginaryMdA [2011-01-13 02:38:38 +0000 UTC]

Hahaha, you're amazing.

I'll answer the last bit first:
Primarily, I wanted it to feel real, so I misappropriated a lot of stems from other languages. I wasn't trying to make it like Japanese. That happened later and mostly by accident (by the time I noticed, it was already integrated).

Latin was compulsory in middle school, so there are quite a few words inspired by Latin (especially those I crafted early in the life of Guhan)when I can't find my own correct sound. I make appropriate changes to account for the absence of consonant clusters in Guhan, which is what makes it seem like Japanese, I think. I draw a lot from French, German, and lately Arabic, all of which I've studied formally. I've also borrowed from Japanese, Spanish, and Tagalog.

You're correct on all fronts.

memoa --> memo-a --> memo is a morpheme that implies or has the meaning of achieved status derived from the word "mo" which means human while the ending -a is simply plural. Although, the word is now "edemoa," and in most cases -memo has been condensed to -mo. It can be distinguished from "mo," meaning human, through writing.

uruague can be broken down (uru) metal (agu) water (e) having the qualities of. My thought process was that a mirror is (was) a piece of metal that reflects like water...

ijara was taken from Jahr (German) which is unsurprisingly similar to Jaar.

sokomo --> soko-mo --> soko from "sokariboi," to write and "mo," human. It would have originally meant scribe but would later have been appropriated to describe the people who scribbled furiously during lectures.

English is not-so-consistent, but as a geek who's never experienced much trouble in spelling (in any language, so far), I enjoy that the etymologies of words are retained in English.

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ImaginaryMdA In reply to far-from-earth [2011-01-13 19:24:43 +0000 UTC]

(let's turn the reply upside down as well)
Well, surprisingly I find English not so difficult to write,
(the only thing can sometimes be double letters or switching a double vowel,
because these were the only subjects that were singled out during class,
and since then I started overthinking them so...)
and also things that do not relate to letters such as hyphens, which I have no excuse for,
and I also think it's very interesting to see how the actual pronunciations of the spelling makes the word travel back in time to when English was still logical, and to see how they relate closely to Swedish and such,
(something I really enjoy is the suffix(?) -y which can sometimes come from -ey and this is the phonetic spelling of the Swedish -ig and that's a very common suffix in German and Dutch and so you can go from handy (English) to händig (Swedish) (pronounced as handey) to händig (German) to handig (Dutch), really my favourite link between English and Dutch/German through the North)

I should've guessed sokomo, really everything was there for me to see,
and by the way, now that I know you know French, could umo be derived from homme?

Ahh, so you know a bit Dutch! well, indeed German only recently differentiated from Dutch (and no matter what the Germans would tell you it's not the other way around)

and I like the way you form uruague, (though it is physical nonsense of course, but most old thoughts are, so very naturalistic!)

I did see the plural suffix -a is memoa, but since memo is shortened to mo are the words umo imo and omo actually shortened forms of some older to long to pronounce words?

Yeah, I think the problem is that so many words that don't allow consonant clusters are Japanese, or at least Japanese-ish, and I find it so funny that there is an actual language called Tagalog, it sounds something like a bad attempt at a language based on pictograms ,

wow, Arabic has such a cool writing system I think, I can't seem to make sense of it though, it looks so handwritten and ancient, (probably because it most of the time is, but still)
And compulsory latin is just plain cruel, I know I studied it briefly, but what if you are interested in science or mathematics? I think you should be allowed to chose, but well, you can't really expect freedom in the land of the free, can you? *shrug*

but I get what you're doing completely, and also the script is really nothing like japanese, it's at most a beautiful, weirdly curving chinese,
(it's really the script that fascinates me the most)
but I think the real problem is when you try to run away from japanese and induce to much consonant clusters (like my language can have really any number of consonants next to eachother if you try hard enough)

and thank you very much for the first comment!

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far-from-earth In reply to ImaginaryMdA [2011-01-18 01:15:36 +0000 UTC]

I coined "umo" before I studied French. I don't recall "mo" being an intentional derivitive and "umo" derives from "mo".

Nope, they haven't been shortened. Umo, imo, and omo are the word "mo," meaning human, modified in such a way as to distinguish different types of human.

o- is commonly used to feminize names and "o" is the 3rd person singular pronoun "she" (o-mo > she-human).

i- is commonly used to masculinize names and "i" is the 3pS pronoun "he" (i-mo > he-human).

"u" is the 3pS animate neuter pronoun (as opposed to "ula," which is inanimate), with the implication being that the sex is not particularly relevant. From "umo", we get "imumo" (boy) and "omumo" (girl).

In regards to Latin, it was a private school established by a local church and they were trying to recreate a "classical" curriculum, so we had classes like Latin, Logic, Sciences and Mathematics, Literature, Bible, History, Music and Art, and strangely enough, Esperanto.

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ImaginaryMdA In reply to far-from-earth [2011-01-22 23:13:43 +0000 UTC]

damne, so wrong after having been so right!

and cool feature with the o-,i-,u- endings, (also so refreshing you posted the o- first!)

well, that does indeed sound rather classical, although it should've involved philosophy, the Esperanto is really strange though, but I guess it's great you learned it, why shouldn't it be,

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far-from-earth In reply to JaiLatte [2010-06-28 05:07:13 +0000 UTC]

Ah, let me think...I believe it's something in the neighborhood of two-to-three-years-old. I never date anything so I'm trying to recall which classes I remember not paying attention in and then counting back semesters...

And yes, I wanted it to sound at least a little like it could be found on this earth, right now, so a lot of my words I built/stole from other words. Good call on library. It (bibadidomo) is a prime example since it's essentially a compound word that says books-at-building. bi(bilo)-ba-(a)didomo. Bibilo from biblia, and adidomo kind of from domus, both Latin.

I pull words from a variety of languages, but I abuse Latin and German most since they're what I'm most familiar with. A lot of words are just what I think something would sound like though. It's essentially an art-lang.

That was way more information than you asked for- Sorry!
tl;dr: ~2yrs, yes.

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JaiLatte In reply to far-from-earth [2010-06-28 15:28:21 +0000 UTC]

That was me too! Only this year. Not to mention I spent almost all of my computer graphics class website editing. I was able to revamp the whole site while not doing work! And I still ended up with a 93%. o.0

No. Don't worry. I've been facinated with conlangs lately and I love hearing about other people's work. Inspires me to keep going with Hseishch. German is such a pretty language. Even with all those glottal and throat sounds.

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far-from-earth In reply to ImaginaryMdA [2010-05-22 20:56:20 +0000 UTC]

=^^= Thank you so much!

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far-from-earth In reply to Trivia-Master [2010-04-10 18:20:05 +0000 UTC]

=^^= Thank you. In a way, it's more economical, but since the syllables are so limited, the words tend to be much longer. When comparing a sentence in English to a sentence in Guhan, the difference in space conserved is usually negligible.

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