This post will focus on one of the Donsilan languages I have in development. Datutan is the principal common language of the pendant holders and Alcea, and shares a great resemblance with the Indo-European languages (see my previous post for the reason). While it is still in its infancy, I can mention some things here.
Category Archives: Conlangs
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Upper monograde and bigrade verbs in Namari
This post will detail two particular categories of Namari verbs. One thing I noticed when going through Japanese verbs is that there are only a small number of upper vowel-stem verbs (ending in -iru) compared to their lower counterparts (ending in -eru). As such, I will analyse each Japanese upper vowel-stem verb and see if its Namari counterpart is also upper bigrade or upper monograde.
New side project: Five to Save the World
While I’m still working on Innocence Seekers: April Light (I hope to have the final episode of chapter 3 finished by the end of June), I’ve decided to take the time to announce a new side project. What is unique about this project is that it will actually be entirely written in Namari. Its title will be Five to Save the World (Namari: よお そくお たん えつつ Yō Sokuo tan Etutu, Japanese: 世界を救うために五つ Sekai wo Sukuu Tame ni Itsutsu), and it will follow five pairs of sisters (aged nine and ten in Earth years) as they try to save everyone in their world from a strange force that “froze” them by venturing into another world.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Colour terms in Namari
This will be the first of a series of posts on the vocabulary of Namari. The topic of this post is colours. Here I will detail the colour terms used in Namari, their meanings, and their etymological history.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Irregular inflection in Namari
This post will detail some of the irregular inflection found in Namari. Like any natural language, not all words in Namari inflect regularly. This is mainly prominent in verbs, due to the nominal declension system being relatively new, but some nouns do show irregularlities.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Namari orthography and romanisation
This post details the orthography of Namari, as well as the main romanisation systems in use. Namari is primarily written in kana, although in the past Han characters have also been used (their use in the present day is largely limited to disambiguation). In terms of romanisation, the most common system is a modified version of the Hepburn system used to transliterate Japanese, although other systems are also in use.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Namari pitch accent
This post will focus on the pitch accent of Namari dialects. Much of this post will focus on the Yaezora dialect, as it is the most complex of the major Namari dialects with regards to pitch accent. However, I will talk a bit about the pitch accent of Chiyohara dialect.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Nouns in Namari
This post will be dedicated to the nominals of Namari. Largely, I’ve kept the original system you can find on the wiki; however, I’ve made a number of changes to the nominal system.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Vowel harmony in dialectal Namari
Unlike the previous posts, this post will focus on a feature only found in some dialects, namely, vowel harmony. Vowel harmony may have existed in an early form of Namari; however, most dialects, if not all, have lost it. In fact, it is not clear if the vowel harmony found in the western dialects is an echo of this prehistoric feature or an entirely new innovation.
Innocence Seekers: The Black Rose – Verb pairs in Namari
As I mentioned before, Namari has pairs of related transitive and intransitive verbs, such as agu (“to raise”, lower bigrade) and agayu (“to rise”, quinquegrade). This post will detail some of the morphological features used to make these verb pairs, none of which are productive in the modern language.