#sondiv

We're getting stuff up here:

Here’s the thing. When you’re creating a language, you can do it all in your head—and on the fly. It’s possible. The issue is remembering it all and getting it right once you’ve settled on grammatical choices. To remember it it’s best to write it down and write it down accurately. That’s what takes time. Additionally, there are natural changes that occur to a conlanger once they’ve undertaken a bit of translation. With such an abbreviated timeline (and yes, it was Sondiv), I didn’t have time to translate stuff that wasn’t in the script—to get a feel for the language. The result is that the translations that appear in the first episode of Star-Crossed are simply not as good as the translations that came later.

In that particular instance, I also enlisted my wife @thisallegra to help me with documentation and the lexicon, and I was grateful for it. The lexical entries she came up with were among the very best in the entire language. For my part, it is helpful to have more structure if you have less time. That is, if your verbs have a dozen forms, then you don’t have to worry so much about how to handle a given translation; you just go to the right cell in the paradigm. I had a large structure in Sondiv for deriving lexical items (to help Erin), and had a complete, rather than open-ended, case system (i.e. it was always clear exactly what case each argument should have).

It’s also not possible to change anything you might not like if you’ve already sent off translations—stuff you usually catch if you have the language to play around with, for a bit. For example, in Sondiv, whose intended word order is SVO, the prefix on the verb is copied as a suffix on the subject, and the suffix on the verb is copied as a prefix on the object. I thought it was a pretty clever way of doing things, but what I didn’t anticipate was that this was happening a lot (these are just dummy words);

Ila avasi imu.

Oki inidu uze.

Edu uyuba ara.

Etc. The same vowel routinely occurred next to the same vowel when going from subject to verb and verb to object. Depending on what other words or structures were in the sentence this was naturally broken up sometimes, but not enough to prevent readings from being awkward. Had I spotted this early I likely would have changed the grammar, but since I didn’t, I ended up producing natural OVS word order. Basically, the tintinnabulation made a word order switch more attractive, with the object dragged out front and the subject deemphasized—or dropped when understood (there’s no person agreement in this language). It’s similar to what I imagine happened with Hixkaryana, which has subject and object agreement as a prefix and suffix, respectively.

Huh. Let’s see… In order…

(Hard. Finding fault with every single one…) High Valyrian.

Indojisnen.

Trigedasleng.

Low Valyrian.

Sondiv, by default. (I had like a week.)

Kamakawi or Castithan.

Indojisnen.

Kinuk’aaz, on average.

That’s one I’ve done before. :) Here it is: