talōnte

talnoote

talōnte

So, first sentence of the LCC2 Relay Text, concerning a talking rock:

il talōnte tiēlen ñi le rā jahāwekien nō il ñi lerāka jawāna sū jakīþa ja pa antēnnā ōl;

talōnte is one of the few (two?) defective nouns. It carries no prefix and inflects to talōnti for a plural which can be either collective or distributive, it doesn’t matter. It also never appears by itself; instead it always follows il, which makes it part of a clause-level modifier dealing with time. So, what does it mean, already?

It means “yesterday” or “ago” as in il talōnte wījtē “three yesterdays” meaning “three days ago”.

“Yesterday…”

antēnnā

anteennaa

antēnnā

Before I get to this word, a note on the next several weeks, if not months.

Every so often the conlanging community gets together and has a relay. A relay is a game we play, much like Telephone, where one receives a text in someone’s conlang, translates it into one’s own conlang, and then passes the text with sufficient grammar and vocabulary notes along to the next person. Some people believe in faithfully translating whatever they get, even if it is somewhat (or quite a bit 🙂 ) nonsensical. Others, and this includes me, believe in fixing up any text they get so that it makes sense to a person who speaks their conlang. This includes more than fixing grammar errors. It can involve changing all sorts of things when the speakers of the conlang are non-human or have a vastly different conculture than the creator of the text.

In honor of the relay that we are currently having, (the 18th Conlang Relay, subscribe to the Relay mailing list for news of this and subsequent relays), I will go through most of the as yet unblogged vocabulary for the LCC2 Relay Text, the LCC3 Relay Text, and the 17th Conlang Relay Text. By the time I am through I may be able to blog the 18th Conlang Relay text, whatever it turns out to be. 😉

So, the LCC2 Relay Text was a story about a talking rock. I had a word for talking as in currently speaking, but not a word for talking as in able-to-talk. Hence, this word. It is derived from the same root as the word for “story”, which I haven’t blogged yet.

This word occurs in the title and throughout the story, generally in inanimate singular to agree with jakīþa “rock”.

xiēn jē jakīþa jatēnnā;
Concerning the talking rock.