[conlang_learners] Taruven

[Jim Henry]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Jim Henry<jimhenry1973 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Brett Williams<mungojelly at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Hmm, well is there any reason we're not considering Taruven?  Do you
>> think it would work?
>
> Quite possibly, especially after the improvements Kaleissin is making
> to the documentation as I ask him questions during the time leading up
> to the relay.

Kaleissin (his other handle, on some lists and fora, is "taliesin the
storyteller") has given permission for us to use Taruven for the
project.

Taruven is an unusual but still, in my judgement, learnable and
speakable language.  It has a high-tech fictional setting (with words
like "ksānyélla", "Dyson sphere"; lit. star-house), and a history as
the lingua franca of a very old multi-species empire.  The nominal
morphology is really cool, with categories for number, case,
locativity and possession (both orthogonal to case and to each other),
and quality (a handful of adjectivial affixes, not just augmentative
and diminutive but e.g. male, female, bad, good, same, other, wild,
tame...).  The case system generally marks agent and patient rather
than abstract subject and object.  Passivation deletes the agent
without changing the case marking of the patient.

Verbs have affixing inflection not only for voice, tense and aspect,
but for a variety of categories that IE languages tend to mark with
auxiliary verbs, adverbs or other paraphrastic constructions; e.g.
validationality, evidentiality, mirativity, mood, and intensity.
Besides transitive/intransitive, there is a class of "experiencer
verbs", whose nominal arguments take different case marking than those
of other verbs; the experiencer or agent is marked with the
complemented agent case, while the patient or focus is marked with the
benefactive case.

Statives, corresponding to adjectives and adverbs in other languages,
share some of the grammatical categories of nouns and some of those of
verbs, with a few unique categories of their own (e.g.
permanence/ephemerality); they can also be turned into verbs or nouns.
 Statives in an attributive role agree with their head noun in case
and number unless they're immediately to its left.

Inflection is agglutinative, with a certain amount of sandhi at
morpheme boundaries and at the ends of words; e.g. an aspirated
consonant being de-aspirated when not followed by a vowel, a nasal
consonant assimilating to the following consonant, or a cluster of
vowels simpifying in one of several ways based on phonological and
morphological criteria.  Besides the sheer number of categories words
inflect for, the sandhi rules seem to me the only difficult aspect of
the language.

The phonology is moderately complex but not unusually so; it has vowel
length distinctions and geminate consonants, and a few moderately rare
phonemes like /θ/ and /y/.

The romanized orthography is fairly phonemic, though not all
predictable phonological processes are marked.  It includes vowels
with macron, acute and grave accents, plus ř (r with hacek) and thorn
(þ) and edh (ð); nothing that can't be easily typed on a standard U.S.
International keyboard layout.

There are a few texts available on the main Taruven website, plus at
least four slightly archaic texts on the various conlang relay
websites, and Kaliessin sent me a utf-8 text file of other unfinished
texts for me to study while preparing for the inverse relay.  The
available corpus is not nearly as large as that of, say, Vabungula,
but I think it's adequate to make Taruven worth considering for this
project.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/