Simple declarative statements
Mood:  hug me
Topic: Grammar
So, you want to make a simple, declarative statement in Jaaje, do you? I think I can help you with that.

First, you need a verb. Let's pick one...

uila -- to love

After all, who doesn't want to say, "I love you" at least occasionally? Ok, so that's settled for example #1. But what about the "I" and the "you" parts?

me= I, me = la
te= you (s) = de
se= he, him/she, her/it = li
ese= second third-person mentioned= eli
ni= we, us = ni
vi= you (pl) = vi
hi= they, them = si

The first form gets crammed onto the verb. The other form is a stand-alone pronoun, which also serves as the possessive pronoun.

So, armed with some pronouns and a verb, let's see what we can do:

uila la a de.
uilame a de
tequilame.
tequila la.

Any of those would mean "I love you". Note that the subject bit gets stuck on the back end of the verb and the object bit gets stuck on the front, while the order when you use pronouns is VSO. The "q" is a glottal stop (alternately written |'|) that occurs between the attached (clitic) form and a verb that starts with a vowel. This only happens with the anaphoric clitics, And, yes, I did go out of my way to work "tequila" into this.

The "a" bit in "uila la a de" means that what came before was the verb and/or subject, and what follows is an object of some sort, or something. ;)

Feeling a little tense? Got a little mood going on? Seeing aspects of yourself you'd like to share? Me too. Let's see what we can do about that.

How about "I loved you" or "I used to love you"?
maquila la a de, or matequilame, would mean "I loved you" (in the past... and maybe I still do!)

But what if loving you was a habitual thing in the past? "I used to love you all the time, but now you're a memory of mine", and all that jazz.

numauila la a de. numauilame a de. numatequilame.

Note that the past marker 'ma-' stays the same, and a new marker, 'nu-', gets stuck on there to add the additional aspect.

You might be wondering how that "ese/eli" form works. Allow me to demonstrate:

Maesequilase = She loved him... or He loved her... or He loved him... or She loved her... or It loved it. Ok, Jaaje isn't very gender specific. But at least you can tell that there are two different people being talked about.

(I will finish this post. I will. Really. Sheesh... Going on several days of working on it.)

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.