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GRAMMAR

Suffixes

-ta (sounds like "caw" or "ma") makes a noun into a verb (e.g. "song" into "sing" or the less obvious "foot" into "walk"

-ri (ree) is a suffix meaning small, young or inexperienced. (an adult dog is a coriaf, a puppy is a coriafri

-r, preceded by a vowel (usually an i, making an "eer" sound, but there are many exceptions), is the opposite of -ri, an honorific which means great, large, old or wise. (Examples: An ordinary tree is a rebai, but one species which grows to an enormous size and lives for thousands of years is called a rebir. An woman originally named Nelamil became a great and highly respected leader, and people started calling her Nelamir. A lilikei is a weaver. A master weaver is a lilikeir.)

-a or -fa makes a word plural, like adding an "s" in English. -fa is used when a word already ends in a, such as taira (tairafa) which means dragon, or Aia, (Aiafa) which means deity. -a is used in most other cases. Aret is an island, so areta would be many islands (or an archipelago). Aieir is a high god, one of the two chief deities, and the two together are the Aieira.

-il, -al, -el, -ol, -ul, and -e (pronounced as a long a) are feminine endings. All girls' names end in these, they make animals and people female, and they can be applied to inanimate objects that are for some reason considered feminine.

-in, -an, -en, -on, -un, and -th are masculine endings, the male counterparts of the feminine endings above.

-iua, attached to a verb, shows past tense

-uem, attached to a verb, shows future tense.

-kei means "one who", like our -er. A weaver (lilikei) weaves (lili) and a teacher (nolakei) teaches (nola)

-aish is like our -ly. It turns an adjective into an adverb. Example: high (ak) into highly (akaish), or beautiful (valoun) into beautifully (valounaish)

-t denotes an imperative verb, meaning you are telling someone to do something. Latin students should get the concept. "eayla" means crack, so if you said "That wall has a crack in it," you would say eayla, but if you wanted to say, "Crack, you stupid wall! Crack already!" you would use "eaylat" instead.

-nu (noo) makes a verb passive in present tense or active in past or future tense (more on this later)





Sentence Structure

Vocative

English: Please stop and eat pastries with me.

Bellcaran: Please with me stop (and) eat foods sweet.
Criu taon nai kaht maftat maf laile.

DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE:
Bellcaran: Criu kaht maftat maf laile taon nai.
Please stop (and) eat foods sweet with me.

English: Please stop and eat me with pastries.

Anything listed after the verb is the subject of the verb in vocative, though not elsewhere. If you add "with me" to the end of that sentence, you've just put yourself on the menu, and something might just take you up on your offer.

Present Tense

English: The high fire warms the people.
Bellcaran: Fire high people warms.
Hael ak sapefa fial.
(subject - direct object - verb)

Past Tense

English: The high fire warmed the people.
Bellcaran: Warmed (by) fire high (were) people.
Fialiua mei hael ak sapefa.
(passive verb - subject -direct object)

Future Tense

English: The high fire will warm the people.
Bellcaran: Warmed by fire high (will be) people.
Fialuem mei hael ak sapefa.
(passive verb - subject - direct object)

Present is automatically active. Future and past are automatically passive. The ending -nu can switch active to passive and vice-versa, and is often used for effect.

English:The child loves and is loved by the mother.
Bellcaran: Child loves is-loved (by) mother.
Sapefri nama namanu namal.

It can also be used when the one performing the action isn't named.

English: The bread is being burned.
Bellcaran: Bread being-burned
Mal haeltanu

More than one subject or direct object

Taking the earlier example of a high fire warming people a step further, what if you wanted to say, "A high fire and good food warm the people."? Writing it the same way you write a sentence with one subject and one direct object would look like this:

Fire high food good people warms.

The problem with this is that if you wanted to say "A high fire warms good food and the people.", it could still look like this:

Fire high food good people warms.

While this kind of ambiguity is common and useful in Bellcaran poetry, it's not practical in day-to-day life. Unfortunately the solution is not overly practical either; it involves sticking a verb at the end (present tense) or beginning (past and future tense) of the sentence and the verb plus the ending -aita (a special form of -aish, like our -ing) in front of the subject or subjects.

A high fire and good food warm the people.
Fire high food good warming people warms.

A high fire warms good food and the people.
Fire high warming food good people warms.

Why this annoying, wasteful repetition? Why not drop the extra verb at the end, or put some special ending on the subjects (or direct objects) to tell them apart? Because this is exactly the sort of thing real languages do! In my experience, real languages are not efficient systems designed by rational beings, and they all do stupid, annoying things. For the sake of making my language seem more natural, I threw this in.

...Please don't hurt me.

So those are the grammar basics! Next, I will try to figure out how to put the alphabet up here!




Alphabet



It's not pretty, but at least you can read it!

Notes:

There is no Bellcaran symbol for C, Q, Y or X because these letters are superfluous. The language is completely phonetic.

C= either the k, s, or ch letters

Q= k+w

Y= ee-uh, which would be the first kind of e listed, followed by the u. In cases where the y is a vowel that makes the long e sound, use the long e. Duh.

X= either the z or e+k+s, using the short (second) e.





VOCABULARY

Because I'm too lazy/busy to type up every word I have, I've decided to put up one new word each day.

Word Of The Day: Nai (like the word "nigh" in English) It means "I". (Na = nahh, with a round "ah" sound, not a spread one.)
na-my______nafa-ours
nai- I_______naia-us, we

Teh. (teh) No, it is false. As in "No, there have not been any new words for almost a month."

Oun (OH-oon, except mushed together) Yes, true, it is so. As in, "Yes, three days went by between this word and my last one."

Curru. (KOO-ru) a small songbird of any kind. Never applies to predators, except sometimes insect-eaters.

Nihilaroun. (NEE-HEE-la-rooun) This is a formal welcome. It can also mean, specifically, good morning. The informal version is Nihi (NEE-HEE).

I just keep editing the first post, so it's not a big deal. Thank you for the comment! As for pronunciation, I'll try to do something about that. I originally wrote these notes for myself, and I know how everything sounds... sweatdrop

It would be so much easier if I could type in the Bellcaran alphabet, because it's phonetic! Since the Roman alphabet is missing some fairly important Bellcaran letters (and has some extraneous ones), I gave up on trying to keep a Bellcaran spelling and just wrote the Romanized versions of Bellcaran words in whatever way I thought was most likely to be pronounced correctly, or in some cases, looked cooler.

And you like that passive/active switch? I was worried it might make things too complicated... I tried to teach some friends of mine Bellcaran, because they wanted to be able to pass coded notes to each other, and they complained about it.

Hate to bump a thread that's a month old but I would really like to see a sample of the script ASAP.

I'm sorry everybody! I haven't forgotten the thread, but I'm in college and busy trying not to fail Chemistry. I promise some script samples soon!

I AM STILL ALIVE.


I'm working on making a Bellcaran font, so I can actually type in it. The trickiest bit is figuring out where to stick the extra letters.

Coo! I really like it alot! It looks like something you'd find in a sacred book or something. I really like it it's so pretty!

You can't? I don't think it's a problem on this end... Waah. I hope you figure out what's going on.