Hi again, conlangy folks. Here's a little update from the Land of Fire.


1) Adverbs of manner

I've already told some listmembers about this little quirk of Tatari
Faran. In English, we have verbs like "to try", "to start", "to stop",
etc., which require an infinitive in order to complete their meaning. In
Tatari Faran, however, there are no such verbs. Instead, the concept of
trying, starting, stopping, etc., are expressed using "adverbs of
manner".

Examples:

	tara' sei   tapa ha    misanan dei   bata.
	3ps   CVY.F walk start village RCP.F COMPL
	She begins to walk to the village.
	(Lit., she walks startingly to the village.)

Notice that in the English translation, the main verb is "begins", but
in TF, the main verb is "tapa" (walk).

	kiran     na    arap    pera beira so    ikat.
	young.man RCP.M pick.up try  stone CVY.N COMPL
	The young man tries to pick up the stone.
	(Lit., the young man picks up tryingly the stone.)

Of course, the English transliterations sound awkward 'cos English
doesn't use adverbs of manner to express these concepts. Compare the
following imperative statements:

	tapa ha!
	walk start
	Start walking! (Notice the English uses a participle)

	tapa bat!
	walk stop
	Stop walking!

	tapa irei!
	walk continue
	Keep walking! (Or, continue to walk.)

Note that the main verb in TF is "walk", whereas in English, "walk"
is a participle (or an infinitive), and start/continue/stop is the main
verb.

Now, of course, this is all fine and dandy when you want to explicate
the action. What if you want to say, e.g., "stop!" in the sense of "stop
whatever it is you're doing"? The generic verb _kakai_, "to cause", or
"to do", is employed:

	kakai bat!
	cause stop
	Stop it! Or, Stop what you're doing!

	kakai irei!
	cause continue
	Keep going. (I.e., continue what you were doing.)

ObConlang: how do you express starting/stopping/continuing/trying in
your conlangs?


2) Tatari Faran tutorial: I've started a draft of a beginner's guide to
Tatari Faran here:

	http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/~hsteoh/conlang/fara/tutorial.pdf

Comments/feedback appreciated. The latter parts of the tutorial is not
quite polished yet. What do you people think of the pace/style/material
covered?

My recent adventures into Russian have made me wonder about what's the
best way to present a language to a new learner. I first started
learning Russian by learning common conversational phrases, and later on
I bought a book, which launches into a full-fledged dialogue in chapter
1, and doesn't actually explain all the elements of the language used in
that conversation until much later. In the TF tutorial, I've taken a
different approach, which is to present material slowly, in chunks that
the reader can fully understand from the beginning.

What do y'all think is the best approach?


3) Lexicon size

After recently updating TF's lexicon size on langmaker.com, I think
startingly (ha!) about what exactly counts as a "word", esp. when it
comes to comparing lexicon sizes.

Tatari Faran's lexicon is supposedly at 993 entries, but before you gape
at the number, you should realize that almost every verb and adjective
comes with its own complement, and complements are meaningless without
their corresponding verbs/adjectives. These complements (of which there
are 200 currently) are counted separately in the lexicon, but they don't
significantly increase what can be expressed in the language as much as,
say, another 200 verbs would, in a conlang without complements.
Complements do add nuances to the language, but one could argue that
since they don't really have concrete referents they should count for
less than a verb or a noun.

Then there are 32 phrases (which add no new words) and 15 affixes (which
really aren't words in themselves), as well as 43 pseudo-entries (which
includes common TF proper names and irregular word forms which simply
point to the main entry of the word).

If we discount phrases, affixes, and pseudo-entries, there are really
only 903 "proper" entries in the TF lexicon. If we discount complements,
we have only 700+ entries.

How do y'all measure the size of your lexicons? Do you include proper
names or common phrases? Any unusual word types (like TF's complements)
that don't really add that much to what the language can express?


T

-- 
Life is too short to run proprietary software. -- Bdale Garbee