Saturday, October 1, 2011

Bljaidi

It came to me in a dream; the faint picture in my head remembered from a whole night's worth of dreaming, a crepuscular digital screen with the words typed " bljaidi " on it, and I understood what it meant; at least in some of the words I knew what they meant without ever having seen them before.

That morning I recorded the occurrence in my journal (dream diary), and began to work on the language. It was a Germanic mix of Baltic and Slavic phonology and influence, taken from the basest roots of the proto-Germanic tongue and applied to an estranged Baltic people on the Baltic coast. Perhaps they were conquered by Teutons? In any case, the more I wrote down things about the language, the more it came to me the words and the constructs that I'd seen in my dream. From what little I had I built off of it to create an entire lexicon for use, and I consider it one of my better conlangs. It was kind of the executive product of my maturation from Lamian, the conclusion of that current; I don't have a name for it, and I've been using Bljaidi since it was the first word I saw (it means bright) and Dyliht (which means twilight).
Some samples:

Ej studan - I study
Ej studans - I am studying
Eje studans - I was studying
Eje studan par Gotisk - I have studied for German, I studied German
Eje studans par Gotisk - I was studying German, I've been studying for German

All verbs end in -an, (some end in -ain), equivalent to the Germanic -en and the Latin -um, and often time this follows a vowel deletion between the letters of the Germanic root; e.g. beran - to bear or to have becomes bran. The Germanic feature ge-, corresponding with Old English a-, has instead transferred from the verb to the Subject and becomes a Subject suffix; for example, Ej estudan, "I studied", became Eje studan, and it stuck that way. Therefore, the Past Tense is made by affixing an -e to the end of the Subject. The verb itself does not change for Past Tense.

Future tense is marked by an -e to the end of the verb, observe the following: (ex. ej bran - I have)
Ej brane - I will have
Eje brane - I was going to have

Passive Mood is achieved simply by dropping the -n at the end of a verb.  For example, bran becomes bra, and in a sentence, ej bran - I have, ej bra - I am had.

Continuous mood (English -ing, e.g. I am studying) is marked by an -s affixed to the end of the verb; studan becomes studans, and bran becomes brans (just like study becomes studying, and have becomes having). Continuous mood for Passive verbs adds an -ni to the verb: bra becomes brani - ej brani means "I am being had". Another example: Gotisk studani i Galjar - German is studied in France.

Nouns

Nouns come in a certain variety: ones that end in -ad, -eo, -i, -av and -t. The ones with the -ad suffix are the most common. Their declension is rather simple:
Blad - flower

Nominative - Blad, pl: Bladi
Accusative  - Blad, pl: Blaidi

Genitive is simply marked by placing the owner at the end of the expression, usually in Accusative Plural case, for example: stav draidi - stem of the tree, where stav is stem and drad is tree.
You thought that was easy? Most of the other endings don't even have declensions. There are some exceptions, such as words that end in -t:
Naht - night

Nominative - Nyt,   pl. Nahti
Accusative -  Naht, pl: Nahti
(**note that -aht is also spelled as -iht).
For the -v declension (e.g. stav - staff, stem) simply follow the -ad declension but replace the d with v (e.g. stav, staivi). Words that end in -i become -y for their Pluralization, but otherwise they do not decline.

Nouns also each have an Adjectival Form and an Additional Form; the Adjectival form simply placed a -j after the first letter of the noun; drad becomes drjad, and it makes it into an adjective. Therefore, drjad would mean strong or durable, since it is the quality of a tree. In order to add an adjective to a word, you must place the adjective behind the word and set it to the Accusative Plural case. If the Noun being described is plural, then the adjective must be in singular.
Example:

stav drjaidi - strong stem
stavi drjad  - strong stems

The Additional form is basically used for word building; whenever you combine two words to make a compound word, the Front word is in its Additional form. This usually is just replacing the last letter with an -i, for example, Drad becomes Drai. With this we can make words using tree and stem; Draistav means "trunk", literally meaning "Tree-Staff" or "Tree-Stem". Words that end in -i (like sti, meaning "grain")have the Additional form of -y, so Sti becomes Sty. Examples of compound words:

Blaistav - stem (like a flower's stem, the stalk); also letter or rune (bright-staff, the lines of letters)
Blaisti    - flower seeds
Draistav - tree trunk
Draisti   - tree seeds

Words that end in -av and -eo do not have different Additional Forms; the words would not change when you use them in compound words. Compound words are not only limited to nouns, but extend to verbs too:

dan - to do
blaidan - to bloom
draidan - to be strong

There are many other features of Bljaidi that are far too extensive to go over here. It is by far my most complete conlang, and I am proud of it; I built it naturally and instinctively. The first words in the lang were blad, bleo (which also means flower/bloom), and dry (meaning tree, in the context of a forest, not an alone tree).  For those of you wondering, the y is pronounced like the German ΓΌ and the -aidi is pronounced something like English "-ithey", imagine saying "lithey". Whenever there is an I near the D, the D is pronounced as a soft Th sound.
I also tried to make each Nationality-name unique by making it have a history behind it, thus:

Gal - French (Gaulish, Celtic)
Got - German (Gothic, Geat, Gotlandic)
Lav - Russian (Slav, with s- deletion)

Either -jar or -jum can be added to denote a country; Galjar or Galjum for France, for example.

I'll post more on the vocabulary lists later. Sample texts are easy to make; the creative versatility that this language offers is great.

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