Written January 27, 2008
I have spent all of today niggling the Shayatsi Language, specifically enhancing and expanding the Lexicon.
It started with a desire to add the grammatical words into the lexicon for ease of Shayatsi-to-English look-up and translation. Yet this became far more involved than I first thought. Doing this forced me to look over the lexicon itself, and thus I spent a long time tweaking the verb entries.
One of the things I am trying to do with Shayatsi is to built it up out of itself. What I mean by that is that whenever I approach a new word for which I need a cognate or translation, I try to determine how a "Shayatsi Mind" might understand the meaning, how the Shayatsi outlook, their viewpoint, would influence and understand the concept I'm trying to bring into the language. Then, I try to see if there are elements that I can use to build the word. As an example:
The other day, I needed a word for 'before'. I knew this would be incorporated into several future words itself, so I wanted it to be short and simple. I considered the English construction: be + fore (front), or "front-being" and decided the concept itself was simple enough, so the Shayatsi word became áni, from an (first) + i (be, being). (The accent diacritic is merely that: an accent. 'a' in Shayatsi is always pronounced like the 'a' in American 'father')
Later, I needed to make a word for 'void'. Now, 'void' is very important to the Shayatsi Mythology. It was the act of God's making the Angels in the Void before Creation (without beacon or landmark on which to fix themselves) that caused their initial despair (and the advent of evil and spite). So the word for 'void' had to carry some of this within it. (As a note, each constructed word shifts the meaning of its constituent parts and takes on new connotation and involvement. Its pieces are not its definition. (thus, áni does not mean 'being first', but 'preceding' (both spatially and temporally), 'in front of', 'before', etc.)
In creating the word for 'Void', I first tried 'before-creation' áni + anya, but this collapses immediately down to anya. The words for the Void and Creation can't be the same!
(I say it "immediately collapses" due to an "ear" I developed for how Shayatsi words are formed: since the formation áni is repeated in anya, they 'overlap'. For instance, the word shayatsi comes from shara + raya + adsi, which, when you combine the overlaps, gives *sharayadsi [the overlaps are: -ra + ra- (and) -ya + ad-]. From *sharayadsi, you can determine that -ara- and -aya- are similar (and adjacent), so they too can collapse. the combination of ry tends to y, so we derive shayadsi. [I spell it with a 't' because I've spelled it that way for a very long time, since before I decided the Shayatsi Language would not include the phoneme /t/.])
Since I couldn't use 'before creation', I tried 'before anything' or áni + endanya > andanya, virtually unchanged (plus identical to an + endanya). 'Before incarnation' (áni + rendi) gives arrendi, which is OK, as is 'before the manifestation of creation (whew!)' or áni + ra + anya which gives arnya (or arrenya), and for a while I used arnya, though I wasn't entirely happy with it.
Today, while I was adjusting the lexicon, I made in into a verb-noun (more on that in a moment), and I considered 'before thought(s)': áni + in > Anín. I really like this construction. It sounds like a Shayatsi word (especially with the stress on the second syllable (cf. Adhénil, Anáwë, Lerínis, et al)), and it contains a clear idea of what the Void represents to the Shayatsi.
What I actually spent most of my time today working on was what I call 'verb-noun' words, for lack of a better term. This arose from the formation of the word Aya, 'creator' and aya, '(to) create'. The same word meant the same thing! I thought this was an interesting feature. I thought it might be interesting if verbs could represent an 'idea' more than an action, and that aya means 'create' or 'creation' or 'creating' or 'creator'. But I had already decided that anya would be the word for 'creation', and that the two were related. Here I noticed that 'Creator' is 'that which creates' and 'creation' is 'that which is created', or the passive form! So there was the dichotomy. For a very long time, I knew this was a feature, but I was uncertain about its 'rules'.
Tonight I laid out much of those 'rules' and discovered that a few of these words should be the same in active and passive (or, more properly, have no distinction): e.g. 'grow' esa, 'dry' divi, or 'burn', yuth. The idea came from trying to determine the cognitive difference between 'growing' and 'being grown'. To the Shayatsi, there is no real distinction. Lerínis iëm-daminel se-esa means the same as Daminel iëm-Lerínis se-esa. ('Lerinis grows the pinetree' vs. 'the Pinetree grows (is grown by) Lerinis') This suggested a high order of contextual semantic understanding, but clearly on par to Shayatsi capability.
In any case, I am quite tired, and I should have gone to bed hours ago (I only got an hour of sleep last night!). I am not certain this journal entry makes sense to anyone but me. I might edit it a bit tomorrow.
Although, before I forget, I should mention that, having come upon a wall in the advancement of Gathering Thunderheads, last night I found my way around it (after barreling through a difficult chapter in which I knew I had to revisit the character (Pah-Tukh), but I had no idea what should happen!). The ending was a nice surprise, and offered an expansion to the story (and desperate need to revise the rest of the chapter), as well as suggesting a few developments that tie in further down the road. Past that, I suddenly saw quite clearly how the rest of Part Two should play out, and I knew exactly how the next five chapters should be constructed. It was exhilarating. I hope that energy remains when I myself have enough to tackle it (writing while exhausted is not a good idea--composing linguistics isn't so bad, on the other hand).
I'll try to update more entries with actual talk of the story and my progress, rather than these dry discussions of something I alone in all the world care for.
If anyone reached this sentence, you win a prize! contact me to claim it.