#rilin

Based off this wonderful fic here!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61163005/chapters/156288751

Admiration

Art Fight attack for @rilin 's Miette the Hisuian Sneasel!

Rílin:

Kaímu fa

Inspired by a thread on Twitter about how our conlangs handle pronouns. 

Pronoun systems! When most people think of pronouns, they think of personal pronouns. These are like English, he, she it, they, you, I, me, them, etc. These are the kinds of pronouns I’ll be laying out here. My conlangs differ in how pronouns are used (or not used), and what pronouns are available. I’ll give a brief sample of each! First will be Rílin 

Rílin

Normally, verbs in Rílin are inflected with a suffix to show the subject of the verb (Rílin is actually ergative/absolutive in its case marking, but that’s another story). This is a bit similar to agglutinative and fusional languages from Earth (e.g. Spanish, Yupik, Latin...). For example, the verb below is marked to show who is doing the action.

tysóa-l-ap throw.spear-pres.hab-3s ‘he/she/they habitually throw spears/a spear’ 

So you don’t really need a full independent pronoun word here. BUT, they do exist. The word fa- is a pronoun for the third person singular (him, her, it, them). 

yní-t-im fa-et own-npst-1s 3s-abs ‘I own it’ 

So there is a corresponding pronoun for all the verbal suffixes too.

One interesting thing about Rílin pronouns is that there are three levels of familiarity encoded for most pronouns. This is like the “vous” vs. “tu” distinction in French, but it exists for third person, second person, and first person non-singular as well. And it has three levels rather than just two. 

So if you want to show that you in fact close with the spear-thrower in the above sentence, go ahead and use the -ap ending. But if not, if you want to elevate them or put some social distance between you and them, use a different suffix:

tysóa-l-ík  throw.spear-prs.hab-3s ‘he/she/they habitually throw spears/a spear’ Wanna get even more formal? Are you talking about a god, a queen, etc.? Need to show massive amounts of respect? Well...

tysóa-l-e throw.spear-prs.hab-3s ‘he/she/they habitually throw spears/a spear’

Dang, you just got super fancy. Who even is this exalted spear-thrower anyway?

The same thing applies when you are saying “you (all)” or “we”.

Subject: just you and me, we’re buds (there’s two of us--I’m addressing you) beväjó-t-ílími  wander-npst-1d.incl ‘we (two) are going for a walk’  But maybe you’re a bit higher on the social ladder than me? Are you my teacher or a respected leader? Then...

beväjó-t-íxymi wander-npst-1d.incl ‘we (two) are going for a walk’  Rílin also distinguishes dual (just two) and plural (more than two) number when in the 1st person. So “you and me” is different from “you all and me”. Another thing that matter is clusivity--whether the person you’re addressing is including in the “we/us” or not. 

Untitled Rílin poem, originally written about my mother.

Here is another poem in Rílin and its corresponding audio. This is a higher quality recording since I have my h4n Zoom again. :3 See the words and translation below. 

Not a nezeletŭ (journey-story) per se, but a nature-based poem in Rílin. Written when I was in Anchorage, Alaska, watching sea birds wheel in the air by the water. Some were gathering nesting materials near my bench.