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May. 28th, 2015 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreHey, everybody! Remember this thing?
I put it away for about a month, but now I'm working on it again. And now I have more grammar and vocab and I am so excited about it! So I wrote out a ridiculous paragraph of kindergarten-level senesh and now I'm going to share it with you.
Plus a transliteration:
cwe-tari nyan. nei rehya cwe-rel sera [redacted]. ei tethe ul teleweir. ei saulei u paulspo, u washiŋtün, meŋ nei mau, nei shethe, un nei sreishena. nei a-yelif tecete wei a-thüsh. ei ra san teŋshür. ei tece hath a-tyeni. ei tece ot aneŋ. luen rehya rel ceiti. ei tece eiya ot neŋa. luen rehya rel mecen. nei a-tyeni sauleite u siatel. ones shau-alehite sauleic hyeim.
Everything is pronounced - no silent letters. Hard c's - I find k's aesthetically displeasing - and voiceless th's. Essentially Latinate vowels (except the one with the umlaut, which is pronounced like saying 'ee' when your mouth is shaped like 'oo'). When y follows a consonant, it works like the fj in fjord, rather than the y in cry.
I feel like I should point out that this isn't my preferred form of transliteration - when I'm writing by hand, the diphthongs and several of the consonant clusters are represented by single characters. (That's also why it's transliterated in lowercase - it's easier for me to differentiate the special characters that way.) However, they're really idiosyncratic and this does a better job of showing kinda what it's meant to sound like.
And a translation:
Hello!1 My name is2 Sara [redacted]. I'm from Delaware. I live in Poulsbo, in Washington, with my mother, my father, and my maternal grandmother3. My parents have three children. I'm their eldest daughter. I have two sisters. I have a youngest sister4. Her name is Katie. I also have a younger sister. Her name is Megan. My sisters live in Seattle. They enjoy living there.
1Literally, "I see you."
2Okay, so, I'm excited about this, so I'm going to point it out. senesh has evidence-particles that attach to the verb in declarative sentences and tell the listener how the speaker knows the thing they're saying. 'cwe-' is an evidence marker that means "I know this because I've personally witnessed or done it". The sentences after the cwe- are part of the same speech-act and don't need another evidence marker so long as the source is the same. This changes when we get to the last sentence, which has a 'shau-' evidence marker. That one means "I've been told this and I trust the source." (I mean, I could use cwe- there, as I've seen my sisters enjoying living in Seattle, but I wanted to include another evidence marker.)
3There's a thing in one of the stories that goes with this language that relies on the fact that senesh has, basically, a fuckton of kinship terms. Which means I have to invent a fuckton of kinship terms. (I am cutting myself a little slack on all the different kinds of cousins.) And that is why all the relationships in this paragraph are so specific.
4In seneshi culture, eldest sons and daughters are important for inheritance reasons, but youngest daughters are considered the good luck of their household and are especially treasured. Which is why Katie gets discussed first. (Sorry, Megan.)
Okay! Assuming anyone waded through any of that - would any of you like to do me a favor? I find it much easier to come up with vocab when I'm translating something - that's why I did the above exercise in the first place. Do you have anything you'd like to see translated into senesh? I can't do anything too complicated yet, but if you have some simple sentences that would be awesome.
Or, if you just want something transliterated into the seneshi alphabet, that would be great too. I need more writing practice. (I promise I'd take a better picture of that than the one above.)
Anybody interested?
I put it away for about a month, but now I'm working on it again. And now I have more grammar and vocab and I am so excited about it! So I wrote out a ridiculous paragraph of kindergarten-level senesh and now I'm going to share it with you.
Plus a transliteration:
cwe-tari nyan. nei rehya cwe-rel sera [redacted]. ei tethe ul teleweir. ei saulei u paulspo, u washiŋtün, meŋ nei mau, nei shethe, un nei sreishena. nei a-yelif tecete wei a-thüsh. ei ra san teŋshür. ei tece hath a-tyeni. ei tece ot aneŋ. luen rehya rel ceiti. ei tece eiya ot neŋa. luen rehya rel mecen. nei a-tyeni sauleite u siatel. ones shau-alehite sauleic hyeim.
Everything is pronounced - no silent letters. Hard c's - I find k's aesthetically displeasing - and voiceless th's. Essentially Latinate vowels (except the one with the umlaut, which is pronounced like saying 'ee' when your mouth is shaped like 'oo'). When y follows a consonant, it works like the fj in fjord, rather than the y in cry.
I feel like I should point out that this isn't my preferred form of transliteration - when I'm writing by hand, the diphthongs and several of the consonant clusters are represented by single characters. (That's also why it's transliterated in lowercase - it's easier for me to differentiate the special characters that way.) However, they're really idiosyncratic and this does a better job of showing kinda what it's meant to sound like.
And a translation:
Hello!1 My name is2 Sara [redacted]. I'm from Delaware. I live in Poulsbo, in Washington, with my mother, my father, and my maternal grandmother3. My parents have three children. I'm their eldest daughter. I have two sisters. I have a youngest sister4. Her name is Katie. I also have a younger sister. Her name is Megan. My sisters live in Seattle. They enjoy living there.
1Literally, "I see you."
2Okay, so, I'm excited about this, so I'm going to point it out. senesh has evidence-particles that attach to the verb in declarative sentences and tell the listener how the speaker knows the thing they're saying. 'cwe-' is an evidence marker that means "I know this because I've personally witnessed or done it". The sentences after the cwe- are part of the same speech-act and don't need another evidence marker so long as the source is the same. This changes when we get to the last sentence, which has a 'shau-' evidence marker. That one means "I've been told this and I trust the source." (I mean, I could use cwe- there, as I've seen my sisters enjoying living in Seattle, but I wanted to include another evidence marker.)
3There's a thing in one of the stories that goes with this language that relies on the fact that senesh has, basically, a fuckton of kinship terms. Which means I have to invent a fuckton of kinship terms. (I am cutting myself a little slack on all the different kinds of cousins.) And that is why all the relationships in this paragraph are so specific.
4In seneshi culture, eldest sons and daughters are important for inheritance reasons, but youngest daughters are considered the good luck of their household and are especially treasured. Which is why Katie gets discussed first. (Sorry, Megan.)
Okay! Assuming anyone waded through any of that - would any of you like to do me a favor? I find it much easier to come up with vocab when I'm translating something - that's why I did the above exercise in the first place. Do you have anything you'd like to see translated into senesh? I can't do anything too complicated yet, but if you have some simple sentences that would be awesome.
Or, if you just want something transliterated into the seneshi alphabet, that would be great too. I need more writing practice. (I promise I'd take a better picture of that than the one above.)
Anybody interested?
