[conlang_learners] Comments on Alurhsa

[Amanda Babcock Furrow]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 12:10:29AM -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

> A few pages on the Alurhsa website give 404 errors or are marked
> as "under construction", but Tony says he can email us some newer
> and fuller documentation than what is on the website.

The grammar pages on the website are all duplicated in the PDF document,
which is downloadable from the site; when I started studying the one on
the site was not the latest version, but Tony may have corrected that.

He certainly has many more texts than are online, although I believe 
the majority are diary entries.

> Alurhsa is a complex language, perhaps one of the more difficult
> ones nominated, but there are certainly plenty of materials to practice
> with.  

I'm surprised to hear it called complex, but I guess complexity is in
the eye of the beholder.  To me, a language like Kelen or Ilaksh, where
I would have to compose my thoughts in a completely different manner,
would be complex; unfamiliar word orders, unfamiliar parts of speech,
unfamiliar mappings of cases to roles, a different idea of how big a chunk 
of meaning a "word" consists of, or very different semantics so that 
most words did not map one-to-one from English to the conlang, would be
complex.

Granted, the verb paradigm of Alurhsa is very elaborate, and we'd
have to work to be sure we were taking full advantage of it instead of
recoding English ways of expressing things, but I note that the verbs 
do come in one unified conjugation, excepting the handful of irregular
ones.  And it was very easy to use for the Inverse Relay, since there
appear to be close correspondences between the meanings of the Alurhsa
words and the English glosses.

> Amanda Furrow recently translated into Alurhsa for
> the second Inverse Relay.  Amanda, would you like to comment on
> Alurhsa as well, and particularly on the documents Tony sent you that
> aren't on his website?

Said documents consisted of an updated copy of the grammar, which
was quite satisfactory, and because I requested it for searchability, 
a raw copy of the lexicon.  I'm not sure if the PDF of the handwritten-
in-Alurhsa-alphabet Journey of Halyihev was sent to me or if I 
downloaded it from the site.

Thanks,
Amanda