#logographs

Why climb the neighbor’s tree?

Ngût kwit i-x̬angqlup tu-chôl-pem sat i-kyat. suppose fruit of neighbor FUT fall enter yard of you.

Suk kyat tu-mok-um u-tyang-noy muk-un? Then, you FUT why PRED-climb steal tree-OTHER?

‘Why climb the neighbor’s tree, when the fruit falls in your yard?’

In one of their early conversations regarding statecraft, Tsyam argued that self-interests could be exploited by the kingdom to fortify itself. Lord Qom countered that acting purely in self-interest, it would be to the advantage of a prince to kill his father to gain power. Tsyam is said to have used the example of a man whose neighbor has a tree next to the wall. The fruit falls in his yard, and the neighbor has promised him that he can take any fallen fruit. In that case, he has merely to do nothing but wait in order to receive benefit. In such circumstances, what fool would jump the fence and climb the neighbor’s tree to pick fruit?

Unfortunately, some men, including princes, are fools.

Tepat also has a system for writing numbers. It uses a system of vertical and horizontal bars, similar in concept to tally marks for keeping track of things in English.

One is represented by a vertical bar. Two is two vertical bars, three is three vertical bars.

After three though, each group of three is turned into a horizontal stroke. Then additional ones are placed on top. Hence, four is represented by a vertical stroke on top of a horizontal stroke. Five places two strokes on top of the horizontal bar. Six has three vertical strokes.

Then at seven, six is converted to two horizontal strokes and another vertical stroke placed on top.

Three groups of three become three horizontal strokes. This continues until we get to twelve.

Twelve is written with one vertical stroke, and then a zero, because this is base twelve. The zero is a loop that looks like a little ribbon - the same as the negative operator stroke.

#22 Nûl-lyom

Mostly, I’ve focused on creating individual Tepatic glyphs representing single morphemes. I haven’t done much Lexember work deriving new words from existing words. Although that is best practices in conlanging, the nature of the writing system and trying to figure that out meant I tried hard to hit every possible syllable type as I worked, in order to complete it. But it’s about time to build on existing resources and start combining words more (Yuk Tepat is very isolating and almost all word-building is compounding).

“Depend” is one such word I was going to make up a form for, then realized it should be bimorphemic. Possible words for “depend on” / “be contingent / conditioned on” are:

nûl-lyom “be possible” + “according to”

wal-lyom “(be) different” + “according to”

kyaw-lyom “change” + according to”

Lyom in all these expressions is a path verb meaning “go along / follow (e.g., a road),” but with extended meaning “according to, by.” It is also in one compound expression that I already used, khot-lyom “act” + “according to” > “obey, follow (a leader, a rule).’

Yuk Tepat is often presented here as a fixed entity - “Classical Yuk Tepat” - but beneath that has undergone evolution like all languages. The following sentences both mean “A man I didn’t know came in.” The first represents the most archaic layer of old Tepat, and the second is a relatively modern colloquial version from the late Conciliarity period.

Ci niw yan-uk syow mi-yat ku hyew.

*[tsi niw ja nuk sju me jat ku hjew]

PAST enter person 1P REL NEG know to room

(Alternately: Ci niw yan syuk mi-yat ku hyew. (syuk = syu + =uk)

Hûq-khal yan i-wat ôl-yat mul nt’ôl-nyul hyew-iw.

[hɯʔ kʰal ja ni wɒ ɾl̩ jat mu ln̩ tl̩ nyɬ çø wiw]

one CLASS person of 1P PAST know NEG 3P PAST enter room CIS

Let’s unpack this. First, a couple of very notable things:

The modern sentence is much longer.

Only three words are the same in both sentences: yan, yat, hyew.

Digging deeper….

Ci was the normal particle expressing past tense in Old Yuktepat, but it has been replaced by ôl in the second sentence.

The second sentence begins with a subject noun phrase Hûq-khal yan i-wat ôl-yat mul, which is normal SVO word order. The equivalent subject noun phrase in the first sentence comes AFTER the verb. In archaic language, this is an acceptable ordering for INDEFINITE subject nouns (but actually, it would still have been unusual for a complex noun phrase like this).

The subject noun yan in the second sentence is modified by a numeral-classifier phrase hûq-khal ‘one.’ This kind of specification of number - such as ‘one’ for any old indefinite noun phrase - is more common in later Yuk Tepat.

The first person pronoun. In the first sentence, there is a clitic form -uk. In later Yuk Tepat, everything has been leveled to the invariable pronoun wat.

The subject contains a relative clause. In the first sentence, it is relativized by syow, in the second sentence it is relativized by i. I also means ‘of’ and has been generalized to all kinds of situations, while specific subordinating particles like syow - which is only used to relativize objects - have fallen out of use.

(Additionally, syow and -uk might occur together as a fused form syuk.)

The negative. The first sentence uses mi before the verb, the second sentence uses mul after the verb.

The second sentence contains a pronoun nat (contracted to nt) which follows the subject noun phrase, before the verb. Kind of like ‘The man I didn’t know, he entered the room.’

Niw and nyul ‘enter.’ Niw and nyul are the same verb basically. Niw is an older intransitive form. Most verb pairs of this sort have been leveled to only one form. In Yuk Tepat, the originally transitive form nyul has taken over everything.

The first sentence has a preposition ku ‘in, at, to.’ This is missing in the second sentence. ‘To’ is considered implicit in the verb nyul. Ku is no longer used except in fixed expressions.

The second sentence ends in a clitic -iw indicating motion toward the speaker. This is derived from the verb khiw ‘come.’

Thank you. Indeed, almost all the characters are hand-drawn. I don’t use an actual brush, but I do use so-called fude pens, which are common in East Asian countries and meant to be convenient like pens, but look like brush writing. Many are felt-tipped but my favorite ones actually have hair like real brushes.

Creating calligraphic characters on the computer doesn’t work as well because I don’t have a tablet so I can’t write the same as I would on paper. Instead I write on paper, scan, and process them on the computer. I cheat a little. In order to make sure everything is in good proportion, I usually write in pencil first, then write over it with pen & erase the pencil lines. After scanning in high DPI and cropping the image, at minimum I adjust the contrast and exposure so the characters look black and the background white. Depending on how much time I have to waste, I might also:

- Manually reduce speckles with the white and black brushes (always use partial opacity and feathered edges on the digital brush - otherwise it looks like editing with a sledgehammer.

- Smooth edges where my hand flinched slightly

- tweak distance between lines / characters if it doesn’t look right