I'm currently working on the next Alien Biospheres video, which should hopefully be out before the end of this month. It's going to lay out the groundwork for the first terrestrial ecosystems, but the plan for the episodes following this one are a bit up in the air; I was originally going to have the next episode be about adaptations to different environments/biomes, but looking at my notes for stuff I want to cover... there's no way I can fit it all into one video, so I was thinking of splitting it up into at least two separate videos, each dedicated to a different biome or group of similar biomes. But the order in which the biomes are addressed is more or less arbitrary.
So, the question is: which environments are you most keen to hear about? And if you have any other ideas about how the videos should be structured or what they should include, feel free to leave your thoughts below.
2020-02-13 19:54:25 +0000 UTC
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I was originally going to make this specifically about polypersonal agreement, but I realized a lot of the stuff I was talking about could be applied to other forms of verb agreement, so I made it about verb agreement in general.
This video will go public on Friday the 31st at 6 pm GMT.
2020-01-26 13:55:23 +0000 UTC
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This was meant to be posted yesterday, but for some reason, this thing turned out to be an absolute nightmare to edit. It made my editing software crash twice, and at one point the file didn't save properly so I had to re-edit the footage all over again (the unedited runtime was 3 hours 13 minutes).
As I mention in the video, I am using a new microphone. Let me know if it makes any audible difference.
2019-12-19 00:46:45 +0000 UTC
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Some fun facts about Edun that didn’t make it into the video:
1. The word achkh, “fire”, which also means "soul", is onomatopoeic. It’s supposed to sound like the crackling of burning wood.
2. The derivational suffix “-ost”, which turns a stem into the noun that the stem produces (e.g. achkh, “fire” > achkost “ashes”), came from the Proto-Thirean root hoohltu, which means “crop”, “fruit”, or “harvest”, because the resulting noun was metaphorically described as the fruit that the verb grows (kind of like the English expression “The fruits of one’s labour”)
3. Speaking of “-ost”, the word for slave or servant is ngwakhost, which comes from the root ngwakh, “to beat, strike”, so a slave is literally “the product/fruit of a beating”. This word also fits in with the teacher vs. steering wheel derivation bit I was talking about near the end. In Modern Edun, ngwà (the word-final consonants were lost in the development of tone) just means “subordinate” or “apprentice”.
4. Edun has multiple ways of saying “yes” and “no”. If someone asks a yes/no question, you use the word fi or chi, which are actually just the present forms of the copula and negative verb respectively ( i.e. "it is" and "it is not"). If you want to express agreement or disagreement with what someone is saying, you use the exclamations hran or khazh.
5. And one final Easter egg, one of the words for the lands that the Empire of the Sun exists in is Tsanduk “the place of the sun”, which comes from a derivational suffix on the root tsan, “sun”. This word comes from the Proto-Thirean root thaan, which I took from one of my older projects, where it was rendered as Thand, and the language they spoke in Thand was therefore Thandian…
2019-12-01 23:24:34 +0000 UTC
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The whole time I was recording this, I was using my cursor to point to parts of the screen, but after reviewing the footage, apparently the cursor is invisible. It's too late to fix it for this video, but in future, I'll see if I can do something about that.
This video will go public tomorrow at around 6:00 UTC.
2019-11-21 20:55:47 +0000 UTC
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I've been battling a chest infection for the past few weeks, and so, very frustratingly, have been unable to record the script for my next video. I'm going to try my hardest to get the new video done for mid-October. Apologies for the delay.
While I've got you, I'm thinking of starting work on a new conlang soon. Would anyone be interested if I recorded my work process?
2019-10-01 14:59:27 +0000 UTC
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A very warm welcome to all the patrons. I am immensely grateful for your support and I offer my sincerest thanks to you all. To celebrate you being here, I thought I’d pen my first ever Patreon post.
For my Nekāchti Showcase video, there was plenty of stuff I wanted to include but had to cut to keep the video at a reasonable length. One of those things was elaborating on the particulars of Nekāchti’s system of negation. You may recall from the showcase that Nekāchti’s tense suffixes each have a positive, negative, and interrogative form.
Tsitarāthra, “I’m going”
Tsitarātsāta, “I’m not going”
Tsitarātsōra “Am I going?”
So, the obvious question is: how do you say, “Isn’t he/she going?”. That is, how do you ask a negative question? The answer, as always, requires an understanding of the language’s history, and also brings up a couple of interesting points about the implications of negation.
In Proto-Thirēan there was a negative auxiliary ta.
The sikaa, “I am going”
The sikaa ta, “I am not going”
This auxiliary acts much the same as the many other auxiliary verbs that Proto-Thirēan uses to express TAM information. However, Proto-Thirēan doesn’t allow a verb to be modified by more than one auxiliary. So then, how do you negate a phrase that already has an auxiliary in place? For example:
The sikaa phüe, “I need to go”
In such a case, the negative auxiliary is rendered as an adverb and is placed before the element it negates.
The sikaa taii phüe, “I don’t need to go”
The taii sikaa phüe, “I must not go”
Notice how the above two sentences convey different meanings. This is what Searle and Vanderveken term “illocutionary and propositional negation”. In our two sentences, the former is illocutionary negation, where the auxiliary verb is negated, while the latter is propositional negation, where the lexical verb is negated (or at least that’s a very heavily simplified explanation of what these terms mean in this context. In actuality, it’s a lot more complicated than that and it's all well beyond me).
So in Proto-Thirēan, the negative auxiliary is used to negate a main verb, but if any other auxiliary is present, the negative adverb is used. This includes when the question auxiliary alo is used.
The sikaa ta, “I’m not going”
The sikaa alo, “Am I going?”
The taii sikaa alo, “Am I not going?”
As the Thirēan languages evolved, the ta and alo auxiliaries developed into full-fledged verbs, eventually taking all relevant TAM marking while the lexical verb was rendered as a participle, and ultimately, in Nekāchti, they became suffixed and turned into what are now the negative and interrogative forms of the tense suffixes. However, Nekāchti still retains the negative adverb, now of the form tē, which still fulfils many of the same functions as it did in Proto-Thirēan, including (in answer to the original question) negating interrogatives:
Tsitarāthra, “I’m going”
Tsitarātsāta, “I’m not going”
Tsitarātsōra “Am I going?”
Tē tsitarātsōra, “Aren’t I going?’
It’s very important to note that Nekāchti’s negative verb forms, because of the way they evolved, confer, by default, illocutionary negation. For example, translating “I need to go” using the necessative form gives us tsitātsopta. The negative form of this word, tsitātsiprāta doesn’t mean “I must not go”, it means “I don’t need to go”. If you want to say, “I must not go”, you’d have to use the negative adverb to make Tē tsitātsopta.
Along those same lines, if you had an auxiliary verb construction like chōnto tsikelo “I can swim”, negating the auxiliary verb gives chōnto tsikōta “I am unable to swim”, whereas negating the converb gives Tē chōnto tsikelo, “I am able to not swim”, or you could even combine the two to make Tē chōnto tsikōta “I am unable to not swim”.
So I guess the take away of all this is that negation can be quite tricky, and that you should think carefully about the scope and parameters of your negation strategies.
2019-06-05 22:53:21 +0000 UTC
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