#be patient and the context will come x'D

[mitamicah]

Stories from summer camp pt. 12

This is part 12 of my stories from summer camp series - for better context you can check out

Masterpost | Previous part

12) Embodying Jere: How I finally got to perform Cha Cha Cha live

It was now Friday July 28, and we were hours away from my team got to play our songs for each other. I had half an hour or less to throw on my käärijä cosplay and hide it again since I wanted the reveal to be a surprise. Fortunately, I had a cleanish, biggish hoodie that hid mostly everything. Unluckily it was one of the hotter days, so I got way too hot with the hoodie on and probably even more wondering glances why I’d wear this hoodie at all.

Now it is worth mentioning that normally when sound producer teams introduce their tracks, they’d do so by asking the sound technician to press play and that’s it. But because we were four this year that wanted to sing our tracks live, we’d gotten the chance to make an instrumental track to perform to. I’d planned in my head a whole little speech about how käärijä connected with me just at the right time when I felt the most down and then I’d reveal my outfit during the intro to the song. Pretty much everything was planned in my head to the T.

The schedule ended up faltering a bit which in turn meant that the time I thought I had to present my track to the world was cut short. I decided to cut my speech into one or two sentences and throw off the hoodie before the track began. 

And then the time was now. The track began and I could basically hear nothing. I almost grew panicky until I started hearing the bass come in. By then I gotten lost in the performance and people seemed to love it. They sang along to the cha cha cha (after I had screamed along to it in the first chorus). By the end of the song my legs gave way under me, and I fell to the ground by the sound of a cheering hall. I later got lots of congratulations and bewildered smiles and shaking of heads. Heck some people even got too captured by the performance that I am pretty sure they’d now go home and watch the grand finale performance so you’re welcome fellow kääryleet. 

In all seriousness tho it was such an amazing experience and even better so that it had been such a journey getting here. I lived long on that experience.

Watching the performance now (since I got a person to film it for me – thank you from the bottom of my heart) I can see I look sort of awkward yet there’s glimpses of something closely resembling Jere – a wildness and charismatic side of myself I didn’t know existed. I would love to share this clip with you someday or maybe both that and/or just the cover. Until then I hope you’d believe when I say: it was amazing as a kääryle to feel an ounce of the excitement that Jere must feel in front of a thousand times bigger crowd smiling, dancing and singing along to his silly little song.  

[miochimochi]

Alright, time to build the language.

Let's play around with word order after figuring some other stuff out first, although I'm leaning towards OSV right now. Let's just remind ourselves the system we're working with

Subject Object Verb Link

The Creator stood upon the mountain and overlooked a frozen land. This is how it was in the beginning.

I'll be going with Active-Stative alignment, so S¹=A and S²=P, perhaps going with agentive-default fluid-S, so this would mean that S¹=A will be unmarked, as it is assumed the default position, where S²=P will be marked, as it is a change to the default. Nouns will have a Agentive and Patientive form as a result, with the Patientive Sole being marked like the Patient. But languages aren't strict rule followers, they have exceptions. I could imagine there being exceptions to the rule, such as a Locative being marked in both Agentive and Patientive cases, depending on which one is being x'd on. Speaking of cases, I think I'll go with Genitive (GEN - attributive relationship between two nouns), Dative (DAT - marks the recipient of an action), Locative (LOC - indicates location in relation to another noun), and Instrumental (INS - something being used by another noun) cases. For the locative case, the specifics of in, on, under, &c. is inferred but helper words could be used.

And here's the rule for adpositions:

Prepositional - Demonstrative, numeral, adjectives, comes after the noun, possessive, genitive, and relative come before the noun

Quantity > Opinion > Size > Age > Shape > Color > Origin > Material > Purpose > Noun seems perfectly fine to me, I guess I could change some just to change some. Could order them by objectivity I suppose. I could go objective to subjective

Quantity > Material > Size > Shape > Origin > Age > Color > Purpose > Opinion > Noun

Or the reverse

Opinion > Purpose > Color > Age > Origin > Shape > Size > Material > Quantity > Noun

The noun should come at the end due to the language being prepositional. So I'll go with subjective to objective for this, keeping the objective closer to the noun just makes sense to me.

Number is something I didn't really go over, that's my bad. English only has 2 numbers: singular and plural. But I'll do more than just the two. Singular (SNG) "one dog", definite plural (DPL) "multiple dogs", indefinite plural (IPL) "many dogs". The definite plural is for a defined or implied set amount, such as "dogs in the city" or "two dogs". The indefinite plural is for an undefined amount, there's just "dogs" out there and we're not talking about some specific amount.

I will also go with a tri-gender system of Masculine, Feminine, and Inanimate. There is a neuter as well, but it would be based on syntax. So this means I would need to determine what triggers gender agreement. The most common is vowel-based triggers. I think I'll go with /i/ and /ɪ/ for the feminine neuter and /a/ and /o/ for the masculine neuter. The masculine and feminine are together the "animate" gender for this language, but this doesn't mean only animals will get it, as animacy has been applied to what is inanimate, such as rivers, mountains, the sun and moon, &c. Pronouns would come from this, so He/It (it¹), She/It (it²), and It⁰ are the pronouns that come directly from this gender system but some others will be used as well. There will be both an inclusiveᶦ and exclusiveᵉ to various pronouns. Clusivity is simply marking whether includes or excludes something. English doesn't have this, if you say "we" one would have to infer by context clues if you're including them or if it's you vs them. So, we have I/me, youᶦ referring to a group, youᵉ referring to an individual, weᶦ including you, weᵉ excluding you, and they. It⁰ would be divided between 3 definites: d¹, d², and d³. These are the this, that, those, and these of the language. There's also the relative and indefinite pronouns which I would say distinguishes directness rⁿ for the relative which refers back to something "to whom it may concern, that which we knew what was to come" and r⁰ for the indefinite which is more general "to each his own"

Another thing I forgot to mention in my last post: articles. Articles are the "the"s and "a(n)"s. English has 3 articles, 2 marked. Definite, indefinite, and zero. Definite is like "the book", whereas indefinite is "a book", and zero is simply "books" as it's only used for plurals and mass nouns. I'll go with animate definite "the¹ man", inanimate definite "the² book", and zero which will be for anything not definite "the² book" vs "⁰ book".

Now for verbs... imma be pretty basic with tense: past (PST), an unmarked present (PRS), and future (FUT). Then I have to think of the aspects that I want to convey. I think unmarked would be perfect (PER - it has happened and still has relevance to the now). There will also be a perfective (PFV - it has happened at some point in relation to the now), continuous (CON - it is ongoing in the now), discontinuous (DIS - it happened but might not be now), prospective (PRO - it is beginning to happen), and I couldn't find one for this so I'm creating the name suspensive (SUS - it is about to stop happening). The discontinuous could only be applied to the past. At least, I can't conceptualize it being used in a present or future tense.

Word order is still there to figure out, though... so the general rule across the majority of languages is Object-Verb bonding. That means that the Object and Verb are most likely to be next to each other. So SOV, SVO, VOS, and OVS. So would Proto-Mochians hold to this? Most likely. But part of what should be figured out is where exactly their Euro-Asiatic ancestors came from and then we can look at how their languages developed. One idea for the first peoples of the Americas would be through ancient Siberian populations. So what are the Siberian languages like? Itelmen is SOV, Chukchi is free but SOV is standard, Alyutor is also free with SVO and VSO being common, Nivkhe languages are SOV, Ket is SOV. It seems that among Siberian languages, there's a tendency towards SOV, but this also may be a result of contact with other languages, such as the Turkic, Slavic, and Mongol languages. What of languages in the region in our timeline? The Salish languages are by and large verb-initial with the most common word order being VSO. Alyutor has VSO also being common, so perhaps the Alyutors (sadly going extinct with less than 500 people and less than 10% of that actually speaking the language) and the Salish might have a common linguistic ancestor? Highly unlikely, bordering on the absurd, though interesting to think about such a possibility. So we could take the other approach to the Salish for that dichotomy of the two worlds, but I think a fusion of them might be better. So what do we get with SOV+VSO? We could use both, and indeed this proto-language will be free word order, but for the purposes of where we'll end up, let's go with VOS as the commonly used word order and give that a shot. Can always change it later as a part of the language's evolution.

Next step after putting all of this together is to take the phonemes and these rules and put them together to finally (for real this time) translate.