What's a language without words? (Don't answer that....)
Mood:  silly
Topic: Vocabulary
I tend to create words and grammar together. I like to have a few words pre-made, built on some vague notion of how the words and grammar will interact, in order to test drive and illustrate the grammar.

Jaaje has very few words at present. I plan on working on both the grammar and the vocabulary this evening, so I may have more to report tomorrow. In the meantime, this entry is mainly going to be about where Jaaje words will come from.

The name of the language itself was selected from an experimental random generation. It sounded right. I liked it better than any of the names I had made up myself. Some of the vocabulary will be randomly generated and then selected in this way.

But that may not even account for the bulk of words, which will probably be begged, borrowed or stolen from other languages, natural and man-made alike. And then many other words will be derived from the stolen and generated words with lots of handy derivational bits.

ala -- to go; also used to connect a noun with an adjective-- "he is tall" would literally be "he goes tall". There are prefixes that indicate "toward" (suala, "to go to/toward"; come in phrases such as suala ahi, "come here") and "away from" (haala, "to go away (from)"). (Edit: 23 Sept.-- Thinking about a revision to this, with a construction either in the vein of "He goes with tallness" or "he goes tall-ly"... Leaning toward the former... Coming in a distant third in the possible revision race is "he talls"... But a move in that last direction is another step toward turning Jaaje into "ea-luna II", and I don't want to go there.)

esa -- to be (copula). For instance, Esase duluka, "He's a dork". With the directional affix su , it means "to become" (suesa).

(Ok, now I am wondering if that should be Esase a duluka... Esa li duluka/Esa li a duluka... Nah, I think esa is a verb that doesn't require marking the predicate. Perhaps it is the verb that doesn't require such marking.)

ahi -- here
badu -- there
yuna -- over there
bika yuna -- Way the hell over there

Building Block Basics 1
Mood:  bright
Now Playing: wypr.org (NPR)
Topic: Phonology/Orthography
My new project has gotten a name, Jaaje, and has gained 2 sounds, /S/ and /Z/, and a new bit of Roman alphabet orthography, |q|.

a /a/
e /e/ ([e], [E], [ej], [Ej]. Same same.)
i /i/ ([i], [I]... see "e" above.)
u /u/
b /b/
c /tS/
d /d/
f /f/
g /g/
h /Z/
j /dZ/
k /k/
l /l/
m /m/
n /n/
p /p/
s /s/
t /t/
v /v/
x /S/
y /y/
z /z/
q /'/
A unwritten glottal stop occurs between two identical vowels, as in Jaaje /dZa'adZe/. |q| will represent a glottal stop between vowels elsewhere. |'| is an alternative to the 'q', and can be substituted at will. (I just have a bad taste in my mouth for the poor apostrophe mark, having recently played some fantasy RPGs and having read some fantasy novels where it is sprinkled into names as if it were grated parmesan to make the verbal spaghetti look more exotic/interesting/whatever the hell they were thinking.)

Stress may end up being fairly irregular. That's one of those wait-and-see things. Vowels may reduce to [@] in unstressed syllables. I haven't really nailed that down either. As previously mentioned, syllables are either V or CV.

Note that I am using |pipes| to denote orthography. This blog builder gets irritable when it sees something that looks like an HTML tag, but isn't.