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…”
You are so talÅnted…..
Sorry, couldn’t help that. I’ve been reading your blog lately and checking out your conlang-related links. I have a newborn conlang of my own (Balapuk) which is boringly largely based on an 1880 conlang and is quite Europeanish (even though the fictional creator of Balapuk is a Japanese linguist captured by aliens. In 1892.).
I think the idea of creating an alien language without verbs is a very cool idea, and I really enjoy looking at it though I’m not linguistically sophisticated enough to understand all of your explanations.
Thank you. As I said to another commenter, if there’s something you don’t understand, ask. If I’ve used a term you don’t understand, ask. It all makes sense in my head, but communicating that to other people is hard, and one of the functions of this blog is to practice that.