Rideable Minecart High School, and other short stories
- Thread starter Snack
- Start date
Snack
🌻Ashita wa nanika ga kawaru ka na?
- Thread starter
- #77
I was talking a little to 22 about this because I've been working on this project again for the first time in years, and since I've been doing a fair bit (although mainly for my perpetually unfinished map more than for the language stuff) with it and started to feel like there wasn't a point when I wasn't really doing anything with it or showing it to anyone I decided to try and compile a bunch of my notes into a post.
To introduce it, this was/is an attempt at making a Northeast Asian-inspired conlang (basically an attempt at Japanese-but-not; I sort of thought I might've started it after playing Analogue: A Hate Story since I believe that was also in 2017, and there is some stuff influenced by Korean (especially the writing system) along with other influences from Southeast Asian and North American languages, but looking at the file history I think I probably started before that) called Layamese. This included, like Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, a significant influence from Chinese, which, besides the original intention of just hewing fairly close to real-world East Asian languages, I ended up using as kind of a shortcut to writing about things other than the language with complex vocabularly without having to coin it myself since I could use (possibly misuse) Chinese characters and loanwords.
I say "attempt" because I don't actually speak any of these languages myself (and don't even have that deep knowledge of them, and I've forgotten a fair bit of what I learned between when I was learning it and wrote my notes and now) and only very barely know what I'm doing with any of this; I can claim something is "right" in it since it's a language I created but that doesn't say much about whether or not it makes sense.
Most of this is old notes, mostly from three or four years ago, that I've lightly edited. There are probably a lot of threads in it that don't really go much of anywhere, bits that I'm not sure I could fully explain or that don't make very much sense, or things that are contradictory. I'll be focusing on just the language here, with very little on broader culture or other topics, because there's a lot already. Most of my added comments are in parentheses () and characters that are standing in for ones that can't be rendered here are in brackets {}.
–––Name of the language–––
"Layam" ultimately comes from classical Layamese */ɬɨjum/~/ɬɨjɒm/ (Middle Layamese */ɬʲam/, Early Modern and Modern Layamese /ɬjam/). In yanshi (Sino-Layamese characters) this is 綠山 lit. "green mountain". The original etymology however is unclear; "Lyam" is a single syllable with no particular meaning despite being written in yanshi with two characters. The second syllable of reconstructed classical */ɬɨjum/~/ɬɨjɒm/ is clearly related to Modern Layamese "yun" ("mountain"), the modern reading of 山, but the origin of the first syllable is not entirely clear. One possible etymology is it is related to "syuri" ("green"), which is the modern reading of 綠.
Similarly to the names of Japan and Korea, the meaning of the Chinese characters for "Layam" gave rise to a Western epithet for the country, "The Land of Azure Mountains" or less frequently "The Land of Verdant Mountains". Note that while the character 綠 never refers to "blue", before about the 18th and 19th centuries there was not a stable distinction between blue and green as basic colors in Layamese, similarly to other East Asian languages.
–––Phonology–––
Consonants of modern standard Layamese
Vowels of modern standard Layamese
Consonant pairs are voiceless/voiced with the exception of /s/ and /ɬ/; both are voiceless, with /s/ being a sibilant and /ɬ/ being a lateral. /ɕ/ exists mainly in Sino-Layamese loanwords. /ʈ/ exists only as a mora-final (or syllable-final, when /ɽ/ is moraic) allophone of /ɽ/, except when followed by a vowel or approximant. /v/ and /z/ exist as allophones of /f/ and /s/ respectively when preceding back vowel. /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ exist in syllable codas and as allophones for, respectively, the consonant-glide sequences /kj/ and /tj/ (/tɕ/) and /gj/ (/dʑ/) before front vowels.
The mid vowels /e/ and /o/ are true mid vowels in most dialects and are higher than /ɜ/, while /a/ is generally realized as a near front vowel despite being classified as a central vowel.
(Historical sound change looks about like this, although for the most part I've been creating words in their current forms and not really putting much thought into what the older form would have been, so a lot of words are probably, historically speaking, unlikely or messy if I was going to try to rigorously apply. On a similar note I'm also guilty of basically just winging it with sound change in the components of compound words. Mostly I'm putting this here because it better explains two things that I realized weren't well-explained elsewhere and thought might stick out; the coda affricates and why the word "han", as in han characters, became "yan". The first derives from vestiges of a major-minor syllable system in the proto-language which remained as late as the classical era, while the latter is because the "h-like" sound was the palatal fricative /ç/, which merged into /j/.)
Old/Early Classical > Late Classical/Early Postclassical > Early Modern > Modern Standard
/p~b/ > /p/, /b/ > /p/, /b/ > /p/, /b/
/t~d/ > /t/, /d/ > /t/, /d/ > /t/, /d/
/k~g/ > /k/, /g/ > /k/, /g/ > /k/, /g/
/c~ɟ/ > /kʲ/, /gʲ/ > /kj/, /gj/ (onset), /tɕ/, /dʑ/ (coda) > /kj/, /gj/, /tɕ/, /dʑ/
/kɨ~gɨ/ (word medial or final) > kʲ/, /gʲ/ > /tɕ/, /dʑ/ (coda) > /tɕ/, /dʑ/
/f/ > /f/ > /f~v/ > /f~v/
/s/ > /s/ > /s~z/ > /s~z/
/ɬ/ > /ɬ/ > /ɬ/ > /ɬ/
/ç/ > /ç~k/ > /k/ (before back vowels), /ç~j/ (elsewhere) > /j/ (onset), /◌/ (coda)
/m/ > /m/ > /m/ > /m/
/n/ > /n/ > /n/ > /n/
/ɲ/ > /mʲ/, /nʲ/ > /mj/, /nj/ > /mj/, /nj/
/w/ > /w/ > /w/ > /w/
/j/ > /j/ > /j/ > /j/
/ɾ/ > /ɾ~ʈ/ > /ɾ~ʈ/ > /ɾ~ʈ/
/i/, /ɨ/ > /i/ > /i/ > /i/
/e/ > /e/ > /e/ > /e/
/a/, /ä/, /ɒ̈/ > /a̠/, /a̠̹/ > /a̠/ > /a̠/
/ɜ/, /ɞ/ > /ɜ/ > /ɜ/ > /ɜ/
/ʉ/ > /ʉ/ > /ʉ/ > /i/ (in morae with /p t j/), /u/ (elsewhere)
/u/ > /u/ > /u/ > /u/
/o/ > /o/ > /o/ > /o/
/ɒ/ > /ɒ/ > /o/ (in morae with /b d w/, /a̠/ (elsewhere) > /o/, /a̠/
–––Phonotactics–––
Layamese is mora-timed, like Japanese, rather than stress timed like English and most other Germanic languages or syllable timed like most Romance languages, and moraic constraints define its syllable structure. A Layamese syllable can only be comprised of one or two morae, must contain a vowel, and cannot end in a consonant cluster.
A mora can be a consonant-vowel (CV) pair, a vowel-consonant pair (VC), a standalone vowel (V) either after CV pair or before a VC pair, a standalone consonant (C) after a CV pair, or a consonant cluster ending in a glide /j/ or /w/ (Cg, onset only) or affricate /tɕ/ or /dʑ/ (Af, coda only). There are around 200 theoretically allowable morae, although in practice many are not used in native words; the largest groups of unallowable morae are those that violate the rule that a mora cannot end in /f/, /s/, or /ɕ/, or rules involving consonant voicing and vowel frontedness, namely that voiceless /p/ and /t/ cannot occur in a mora with a back vowel while voiced /b/ and /d/ cannot occur in a mora with a front vowel. This also applies to the glides /j/ (treated as /i/) and /w/ (treated as /u/).
In the case of long (doubled) vowels, a moraic boundary can occur in the middle of the vowel sound, so kín "finger" and ú "owl" are effectively considered /ki·in/ and /u·u/. If kín were analysed as it is written, {ki}-{i}-{n} (the mora "ki", a long vowel mark, and the mora "n") it would be trimoraic syllable which is not permitted in Layamese. For the same reason long vowels cannot occur in syllables with a consonant-glide cluster, whether in the onset or coda.
Therefore, allowable syllables are, with colons to indicate mora boundaries;
V
V:V
V:Af
CV
CV:V
CV:C
CV:Af
Cg:V
VC
V:VC
Cg:VC
–––Grammar–––
(A lot of this is rough; grammar is something I'm pretty terrible at)
Layamese exhibits many common Northeast Asian areal features in its grammar; it is a highly regular agglutinative language with subject-object-verb preference in its word order and topic-comment sentence structure. Nouns are not inflected as such, although they can take on honorific prefixes, with case and topicality being marked by particles. Verbs are heavily inflected and adjectives take similar forms.
Case-marking particles of modern standard Layamese
Layamese verbs (donsi, Yanshi: 動詞) are always located at the end of a sentence, as in Korean and Japanese. Most adjectives in Layamese (yenyosi, Yanshi: 形容詞) are conjugated similary to verbs and are often referred to as "descriptive verbs" rather than as adjectives. Verb conjugation is extensively agglutinative with elements of fusionality, with affixes for politeness, tense-aspect, causativity-instrumentality, voice, mood, and negation. Regular verbs can have up to six affixes, seven depending on how honorific affixes are counted, mainly postfixed but in some verbs including prefixed honorifics.
There are four categories of regular Layamese verbs (including adjectives), with slight differences in conjugation. R-stem verbs always have plain forms ending in "-ri" (as such, the stem form always ends in "-r-"). Possible endings are "-ari", "-åri", "-uri", and "-ori"; "-iri" also appears, though in only the word "kiri" and a small number of Sino-Layamese words. R-stem verbs often have shared roots with nouns and include a large number of adjectives, including most basic color terms (for example "syuri" meaning "green"; this is also an example of a shared root ("syu-"), namely with "syun" meaning "leaf"). This is still productive, with the suffixes "-ari" ("-nari" when the noun it is being suffixed to ends in a vowel), and also encompassess all Sino-Layamese verbs.
There are also less common sh-stem ("-shi", "-sh-") and l-stem ("-li", "-l-") words, which conjugate identically to r-stem but only appear as adjectives. The suffixes "-ashi" and "-nashi" are still productive in creating adjectives from nouns, while the above "-ari"/"-nari" suffixes (although they can appear in adjectives themselves) are only used to create new verbs. Sh-stem adjectives are part of a relatively small class of words which contain the "sh" sound, along with some ideophones, particles, certain compounds, and Sino-Layamese and Atei loanwords.
Y/W-stem verbs have plain forms ending in either "-ya" or "-wa", with the corresponding stem form endings being "-y-" and "-w-". Most but not all begin with a consonant. Besides y/w-stem "common class" verbs there are two smaller related subclasses with identical or mostly identical conjugation. The first are k-stem verbs ("-ka" and -k-" endings), which derive from some verbs which in Middle Layamese and before were h-stem (other h-stem verbs became y-stem; generally speaking h-stem verbs with the vowels /u/ and /o/ became k-stem). The second are y/w-stem uncommon class verbs, which always begin with a vowel (although some common class y/w-stem verbs begin with a vowel as well) and differ in that they take the prefixed honorific "mun-".
Layamese verbs and adjectives have three different levels of honorific/politeness, referred to as x-honorific, m-honorific or mu-honorific, and s-honorific or su-honorific. The x-honorific form has no affix, the m- or mu-honorific form, depending on the word, has either the prefix "mun-" (in y/w-stem uncommon class verbs) or suffix "-munu", while the more polite s- or su-honorific form has either the suffix "-munusu" or, in words which take the prefix "mun-", the suffix "-su" ("-usu" if the preceding sound would be a consonant) along with prefixed "mun-" , making it a circumfix. Honorific suffixes are always word final.
Layamese has a set of instrumental affixes similar to those used in many North American languages. In Old Layamese this was seperate from the causative affix, but these became fused in Modern Layamese, with the instrumental affix "-aka-" ("with the hand") becoming a generic causative ending, and the affixes became more general and fewer in number. Causative-instrumental suffixes exhibit regular fusionality.
The instrumental suffixes in Modern Layamese are "-anka-" ("with the hand"; a coinage from "kan" meaning "hand", which was itself cognate with "-aka-" as well as with the instrumental case particle "ga"), "-ula-" ("with the foot", cognate with "mala" meaning "foot"), "-oru-" ("with the head, with the mind", cognate with "orui" meaning "head, mind"), "-oke-" ("with the leg/s, with the arm/s", cognate with "goge" meaning "limb, tree branch"), "-ogyo-" ("with a long object", also cognate with "goge"), "-eko-" ("with a sharp object, with the tip of a long object, cognate with "teko" meaning "thorn, needle"), "-usi-" ("with a small, short, or round object", cognate with "ulsi" meaning "stone"), and "-igyi-" ("with fire, by natural forces", cognate with "gyi" meaning "fire").
The corresponding causative-instrumental suffixes are "-aka-" or "-akagi- ("make/cause to be done with the hand"), "-ulgi-" ("make/cause to be done with the foot"), "-oti-" ("make/cause to be done with the head or mind, with a small, short, or round object"; this comes from conflating "-oru-" and "-usi-"), "-ityi-" ("make/cause to be done with the legs or arms", cognate with "atye" meaning "leg"; originally was the instrumental affix for "with the legs" while "-oke-" was exclusively "with the arms"), "-egi-" ("make/cause to be done with a long object, with a sharp object, with the tip of a long object"; this comes from conflating "-ogyo-" and "-eko-"), and "-igyigi-" ("make/cause to be done with fire or other forces").
The definite (and only) article in Layamese is the particle "ke", which is placed after a noun but before any case marking particles. The article has x-honorific, mu-honorific, and su-honorific forms similar to verbs; the mu-honorific form is "uki" or rarely "muki" while the su-honorific form is "ukisu", or "ukisun" if the following word starts with a vowel.
The definite article also creates a noun or verbal noun from a verb, very similar to the English suffix -ing. This is often connected to a noun it modifies with the genitive case particle ru, similarly to Japanese. Verbal nouns can decline for different levels of politeness by using different forms of ke. For example yusuri ("to relax") + ke for yusurike ("relaxtion, vacation").
(In practice creating verbal nouns – well, and a few other nouns that aren't derived from verbs – is most of what I've been doing with the definite article, although I also started using it as an element in family names the last round of additions to that list; for example Asake "(from/lives at) the estuary")
(The order of affixes in verb conjugations would be something like this)
(∞honorific)–0stem–1tense–2causative/instrumental–3voice–4mood–5negation–(6honorific)
–––Address–––
(Partly this was defined because in writing anime fanfiction I tend to maintain the honorifics characters use for each other, so when considering writing stuff for the language/setting by analogy, since the system of honorifics is similar to Japanese, I was going to use the Layamese honorifics in English)
Layamese has an intricate and interconnected system of pronouns, honorific terms of address, kinship terms, and demonstratives, which vary depending on social status, age, and gender.
Layamese extensively makes use of postnomial honorifics, similar to Japanese and Korean. As in Japanese and unlike Korean these are generally appended to, if not the full name, the surname rather than the given name. The most common and most general is "asagi" (elided form of asata "person" (itself from root sat- with honorific prefix a-) plus uki "the, this", roughly meaning "the honored person"), which is used for most people unrelated to the speaker, similarly to Japanese "san" or Korean "-ssi". In earlier usage (widespread in Early Modern Layamese and into the mid 20th century, originating in the court register of Classical Layamese) "asagi" was slightly less formal or polite than the corresponding "asagu" (for men) or "asaki" (for women), but this distinction is now almost nonexistent in speech and rare in writing. In speech and in compounds it is sometimes further abbreviated to "agi".
A further clipped form of "asagi", "sai" or "ai" is similar in use to Japanese "chan" or "kun" and somewhat similar to Korean "-a" or "-ya". "Sai" and "ai" are used between close friends or family or as terms of endearment. Similarly to Korean (although unlike the closest equivalents in Korean they are proper honorifics and not case markers) "sai" is attached to names ending in a vowel and "ai" is attached to names ending in a consonant. Unlike Japanese, they do not have a gendered association.
"Sai" and "ai" are also commonly used to created nicknames by appending them to part of a name or to a different reading of a character used in a name. For example, the name "Yunui" ("mountain hibiscus"; the common yanshi spelling would be 山槿) could become "Yussai" (adding the honorific to the first mora of the name), "Nuissai" (adding the honorific to the end of the name; note that in this case the part of the name taken crossed morpheme borders while in the first case only part of the first morpheme is taken) or "Kinai" (adding the honorific to the tyekota (Chinese-derived) reading of the second character in the name, 槿 "hibiscus").
A higher level of honorific, similar in use to Japanese "dono", is "kishi" (from kishada "lord, one's superior", itself ultimately from an elided form of kiri "high" plus sada "person", a word from the same root as "asata" used only in compounds). "Kishi" and its equivalents are used for people of the same or similar status to the speaker but is more respectful and formal than "asagi" and its variations. "Kishi" is used for women as well as men, but in the past (and rarely in modern usage) "kime" (formed similarly to "kishi" but with the suffix me "woman") was used for women. Other variations (sometimes seen as more polite or respectful, but largely used interchangably) were "akishi" and "akime", with the addition of the honorifc prefix a-.
The highest level of honorific in common modern usage is "kirugi" (elided form of kiri "high" plus uki, rough literal meaning being "the high one", with a more figurative translation being "my lord"), which is used for people of a higher status than the speaker, most comparable to Japanese "sama" or Korean "-nim". Gender distinction in Modern Layamese is stronger at this honorific level than at lower levels; although using "kirugi" for a woman is generally acceptable in speech, it is common (and in writing, preferred) to use "miyuki" (elided form of ayomi (omye "woman" plus honorific prefix ay-) plus uki, meaning roughly "the lady" or "my lady").
The commonly used honorific forms can be compared to the X-honorific, Mu-honorific, and Su-honorific level of verb conjugation, and generally in a sentence any personal honorific used should agree with the honorific conjugation. "ai/sai" is X-honorific, "asagi" is X- or Mu-honorific, "kishi" is Mu-honorific, and "kirugi" and "miyuki" are Su-honorific.
As in Japanese, occupational and official titles can be used as honorifics, alone or with another honorific term appended. These are generally Mu-honorific. There are also other, less general honorific terms, such "ayoshaji" (elided form of ayoshada "most knowledgable person" (orushi "intelligent" plus sada "person" with honorific/superlative prefix ay-" plus uki", roughly meaning "the most knowledgable one" and translatable to "doctor" or "master"), which is similar to Japanese "sensei", Chinese "sifu", Sanskrit "guru", or Tibetan "lama".
There is an even higher level of honorific in the term "akkishu" (elided form of kiri (with honorific prefix a-) plus ukisu "the, this" (ukisu is the Su-honorific form, in contrast to Mu-honorific "uki"), roughly meaning "the highmost one"). No longer in common use, it was historically used for members of the imperial family short of the emperor himself and for deities. It survives primarily in referring to gods, for example Yashieakkishu "the highmost one Yashie", and occasionally as a term of extraordinary respect, such as for historical national heroes. In the court register of Classical Layamese there was also feminine "akkishuye", but this has fallen out of use completely. Akkishu is less commonly used for other gods than for Yashie, emphasizing her role as first-among-equals in the Layamese pantheon.
–––Writing system–––
Lyammol ("Layamese language") in the Inamyo script.
Annotated in the Latin alphabet. Each character block is read top-to-bottom internally and then the blocks are read left-to-right. Letters can also appear on their own, as the syllable-final L in mol does here.
The script used to write Layamese phonemically is called Inamyo ("borrowed letters", from ina "borrowing" + myo "letter, writing"). The name is identical in meaning to Japanese "kana", and both scripts share a common origin of having evolved from Chinese characters (known as "yanshi" in Layamese) used to represent the phonemes of the vernacular language.
As with kana, the script represents morae rather than either phonemes or syllables, although it can also be used as an alphabet; the script consists of 21 letters, which have both moraic (known as shenshimu 整字母 "whole letter") forms (used when writing as individual phonemes, but in standard usage representing initial vowels in a VVC syllable or final sounds in a CVV or CVC syllable) and "combining" (pinshimu 份字母 "part-letter") forms, which are written as a vertical block similar to hangul (known as momoshimu 音字母 "sound letter" or "mora letter"). Inamyo can be classified as a semi-syllabary; it can be seen as more syllabic than Hangul as generally possible blocks besides the 150 used for morae existing in modern standard Layamese and less frequently the obsolete morae using {h} and {ü} are not used. Clusters not existing in Layamese and sometimes (non-Sinitic) loanwords in general can be represented in purely alphabetical writing.
The directionality of the script has always varied, with both Brahmic-influenced left-to-right, horizontal writing and Chinese-influenced vertical, right to left writing appearing from the earliest use of Inamyo in the 10th century. While the letter forms in Inamyo are derived from the Chinese script, the influence of the Brahmic scripts may be indicated by the fact that Inamyo's use of tall, narrow letters, which already appear in the earliest texts, has always been more suited to horizontal writing.
(Originally I think this explanation was just an attempt to solve an oversight I made in constructing inamyo as a horizontal left-to-right script from the beginning not really thinking about vertical writing)
In vertical writing, a number of different representations of shenshimu have been seen; in some texts they are written full width or almost full width, while sometimes henshimu rotated 90 degrees or stand-alone pinshimu were used instead, written in the center of the square block of space usually occupied by a Chinese character or momoshimu. Some texts even used stand-alone pinshimu exclusively, two to a space without regard for moraic boundaries, effectively using Inamyo as a purely vertical alphabet. By the late 18th century horizontal writing began to become more common, and by the early 20th century it was ubiquitous even in mixed texts using both Inamyo and yanshi.
Chinese characters (yanshi) can have both Sinitic and native readings, as in Japanese and Korean. The former is known as tyekota or tyekduk 冊讀 "book reading" and the later as molota 語讀 "speech reading".
There are two common romanization standards for Layamese; the newer Tyenpyuden-sik 政府定式 "government-established/official-style" is now more widely used particularly in Layam, and tends more towards a morphophonemic representation, while the older Upshaw system (in Layamese "Åpsha-sik") was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the west. Tyenpyuden-sik is a one-to-one representation of Inamyo spelling, while Upshaw is more phonetic and designed to be easier for a native reader of English to pronounce accurately.
The key differences are;
Upshaw transcribes /ɜ/ as "eu", rather than "å" as in tyenpyuden.
Upshaw transcribes /f/ and /s/ before /u/ and /o/ as "v" and "z", respectively, reflecting allophony which is not phonetically represented in tyenpyuden or Inamyo.
Upshaw transcribes /ɾ/ as "dy" rather than "ɽ" initially and intervocalically, and as "dh" finally. Therefore it captures allophonic /ʈ/ where tyenpyuden and Inamyo do not.
Upshaw transcribes /ɬ/ as "h" rather than "l" initially and intervocalically, and as "lh" finally. (By the time there was a systematized romanization /ç/ had already been lost in most dialects)
Upshaw transcribes /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ as "ch" and "j" respectively, both when they appear in the coda and when they appear allophonically before /i/ and /e/. In all positions, affricates are not distinguished from their counterpart consonant-glide clusters in Inamyo or in pure tyenpyuden.
Upshaw seperates vowel sequences with an apostrophe and transcribes long vowels with doubled letters, while tyenpyuden transcribes them with an acute accent on the vowel letter.
In the west, tyenpyuden is now the most commonly used standard as well, although generally "ky" and "gy" for /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ are sometimes substituted out for "ch" and "j". Personal names often use some Upshaw conventions, such as doubled vowels rather than accents and use of the digraph "eu" instead of "å".
(If I remember correctly I'd decided "Upshaw" was named something like John Charles Upshaw and that he was probably an Ivy League guy and/or a missionary)
The Shiwawan (lit. "Letter garland", Yanshi: 字花環) represents the homorganic order of the characters representing the 168 possible morae (166 characters) in the modern standard dialect of Layamese, along with 5 letters which cannot form a native mora on their own and a letter which denotes the vowel of the preceding character is doubled, for a total of 172 characters. The name "Shiwawan" is a calque into Sino-Layamese characters of Sanskrit "varṇamālā" (वर्णमाला), the name for the homorganic order of characters in the Brahmic scripts. The shiwawan itself follows this same order. On this chart, each character is arranged according to the homorganic script order, with characters not used in native words highlighted in green and empty blocks grayed out.
(This can also be consulted for tyenpyuden-sik romanized spelling; I don't have anything specific lying around for that)
Alphabetization in Layamese is based on the shiwawan, but is not identical to how the characters are ordered on it, in which each column for a vowel or glide sound is read in order, first the plain vowel letter, then all morae starting with it, then all morae ending with it, then moving to the next column, with plain consonant letters at the end (for example "am" is followed by "ka" and "fa" by "å"). Instead it is closer to an alphabetic order; words starting with a given plain vowel letter are first, then all morae starting with a vowel, then moving to the next vowel, with consonants (including glides) in order after, starting with the plain letter then all morae beginning with the letter and so on ("am" is followed by "å" and the last entries in a dictionary would be under "fo").
(I actually have a font and keyboard layout for this; it's a fully working script, although were it a real language it would have an IME whereas the best I could do somewhat easily was dead keys to form the character blocks similarly to how combining diacritics work which is fairly clumsy. The keyboard layout is Mac specific though and I don't know if anyone else here is both interested at all and uses Mac OS, and without the keyboard layout just having the font wouldn't do much because the letters have their own codepoints from the Unicode private use area instead of it being structured as a Latin cypher with the letters assigned to Latin letter codepoints, otherwise I'd probably put a download link.)
(There's a chart with all the glyphs which has more information on each letter, such as their derivation and which if any Japanese kana they are sibling characters, here. It also includes punctuation and various obsolete characters which were used to write phonemes which were lost in the modern standard language or to transcribe Chinese or other languages.)
–––Examples–––
I never worked out the verb conjugations fully, so the best examples I have of the language are all pretty short.
kiru yusurike yó sukamo
this relax-the-NOM stop-IMP
"stop this relxation!" or "stop relaxing!"
This demonstrates the use of a verbal noun suffixed with -ke.
min-uki gi mugiyegikumunu
child the-POLITE-TOPIC eat-with long object-CAUSATIVE-not-POLITE
"(as for) the child, (they) could not be made to eat with chopsticks"
This demonstrates a use of the instrumental affix as well as mu-honorific word forms. It's also a good example of topic-comment grammar, which is uncommon in English.
mugiyankakumunosuko
mugiy-anka-ku-munosuko
eat-with hands-not-POLITE
"please kindly do not eat with your hands"
This also demonstrates the instrumental affixes, as well as su-honorific. I mentioned this (along with a few other bits about the language) ages ago in my ask thread when Anton asked about words people had made up because it's a good example of how agglutination (and the fact that in a lot of non-English languages it's admissible to drop pronouns) can make a single word that acts as an entire decently sized sentence.
As with everything I make I'm perennially unsure how much I actually like this. I've also noticed that it suffers from, basically, me being too much of a weeb and most familiar with Japanese out of the languages I look at for influence (and I mainly looked at Japanese to begin with); namely the words I like more I feel are often ones that are closer to fitting Japanese phonotactics and I feel like that may have lead to me kind of not using the whole range of the language's own phonotactics much. In general especially with worldbuilding I feel like my ideas don't have much originality, although obviously there isn't really anything truly new and original in the world anyway.
If you quiz me on if I can explain half of this I won't be able to, but you can try anyway. I can't really read inamyo or pronounce some of the phonemes very well either.
To introduce it, this was/is an attempt at making a Northeast Asian-inspired conlang (basically an attempt at Japanese-but-not; I sort of thought I might've started it after playing Analogue: A Hate Story since I believe that was also in 2017, and there is some stuff influenced by Korean (especially the writing system) along with other influences from Southeast Asian and North American languages, but looking at the file history I think I probably started before that) called Layamese. This included, like Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, a significant influence from Chinese, which, besides the original intention of just hewing fairly close to real-world East Asian languages, I ended up using as kind of a shortcut to writing about things other than the language with complex vocabularly without having to coin it myself since I could use (possibly misuse) Chinese characters and loanwords.
I say "attempt" because I don't actually speak any of these languages myself (and don't even have that deep knowledge of them, and I've forgotten a fair bit of what I learned between when I was learning it and wrote my notes and now) and only very barely know what I'm doing with any of this; I can claim something is "right" in it since it's a language I created but that doesn't say much about whether or not it makes sense.
Most of this is old notes, mostly from three or four years ago, that I've lightly edited. There are probably a lot of threads in it that don't really go much of anywhere, bits that I'm not sure I could fully explain or that don't make very much sense, or things that are contradictory. I'll be focusing on just the language here, with very little on broader culture or other topics, because there's a lot already. Most of my added comments are in parentheses () and characters that are standing in for ones that can't be rendered here are in brackets {}.
–––Name of the language–––
"Layam" ultimately comes from classical Layamese */ɬɨjum/~/ɬɨjɒm/ (Middle Layamese */ɬʲam/, Early Modern and Modern Layamese /ɬjam/). In yanshi (Sino-Layamese characters) this is 綠山 lit. "green mountain". The original etymology however is unclear; "Lyam" is a single syllable with no particular meaning despite being written in yanshi with two characters. The second syllable of reconstructed classical */ɬɨjum/~/ɬɨjɒm/ is clearly related to Modern Layamese "yun" ("mountain"), the modern reading of 山, but the origin of the first syllable is not entirely clear. One possible etymology is it is related to "syuri" ("green"), which is the modern reading of 綠.
Similarly to the names of Japan and Korea, the meaning of the Chinese characters for "Layam" gave rise to a Western epithet for the country, "The Land of Azure Mountains" or less frequently "The Land of Verdant Mountains". Note that while the character 綠 never refers to "blue", before about the 18th and 19th centuries there was not a stable distinction between blue and green as basic colors in Layamese, similarly to other East Asian languages.
–––Phonology–––
Consonants of modern standard Layamese
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Velar | |
| Stop | p b | t d | (ʈ) | k g |
| Affricate | tɕ dʑ | |||
| Fricative | f (v) | s (z) ɬ | ɕ | |
| Nasal | m | n | ||
| Approximant | w | j | ||
| Flap | ɽ |
Vowels of modern standard Layamese
| Front | Mid | Back | |
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ɜ | o |
| Open | a |
Consonant pairs are voiceless/voiced with the exception of /s/ and /ɬ/; both are voiceless, with /s/ being a sibilant and /ɬ/ being a lateral. /ɕ/ exists mainly in Sino-Layamese loanwords. /ʈ/ exists only as a mora-final (or syllable-final, when /ɽ/ is moraic) allophone of /ɽ/, except when followed by a vowel or approximant. /v/ and /z/ exist as allophones of /f/ and /s/ respectively when preceding back vowel. /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ exist in syllable codas and as allophones for, respectively, the consonant-glide sequences /kj/ and /tj/ (/tɕ/) and /gj/ (/dʑ/) before front vowels.
The mid vowels /e/ and /o/ are true mid vowels in most dialects and are higher than /ɜ/, while /a/ is generally realized as a near front vowel despite being classified as a central vowel.
(Historical sound change looks about like this, although for the most part I've been creating words in their current forms and not really putting much thought into what the older form would have been, so a lot of words are probably, historically speaking, unlikely or messy if I was going to try to rigorously apply. On a similar note I'm also guilty of basically just winging it with sound change in the components of compound words. Mostly I'm putting this here because it better explains two things that I realized weren't well-explained elsewhere and thought might stick out; the coda affricates and why the word "han", as in han characters, became "yan". The first derives from vestiges of a major-minor syllable system in the proto-language which remained as late as the classical era, while the latter is because the "h-like" sound was the palatal fricative /ç/, which merged into /j/.)
Old/Early Classical > Late Classical/Early Postclassical > Early Modern > Modern Standard
/p~b/ > /p/, /b/ > /p/, /b/ > /p/, /b/
/t~d/ > /t/, /d/ > /t/, /d/ > /t/, /d/
/k~g/ > /k/, /g/ > /k/, /g/ > /k/, /g/
/c~ɟ/ > /kʲ/, /gʲ/ > /kj/, /gj/ (onset), /tɕ/, /dʑ/ (coda) > /kj/, /gj/, /tɕ/, /dʑ/
/kɨ~gɨ/ (word medial or final) > kʲ/, /gʲ/ > /tɕ/, /dʑ/ (coda) > /tɕ/, /dʑ/
/f/ > /f/ > /f~v/ > /f~v/
/s/ > /s/ > /s~z/ > /s~z/
/ɬ/ > /ɬ/ > /ɬ/ > /ɬ/
/ç/ > /ç~k/ > /k/ (before back vowels), /ç~j/ (elsewhere) > /j/ (onset), /◌/ (coda)
/m/ > /m/ > /m/ > /m/
/n/ > /n/ > /n/ > /n/
/ɲ/ > /mʲ/, /nʲ/ > /mj/, /nj/ > /mj/, /nj/
/w/ > /w/ > /w/ > /w/
/j/ > /j/ > /j/ > /j/
/ɾ/ > /ɾ~ʈ/ > /ɾ~ʈ/ > /ɾ~ʈ/
/i/, /ɨ/ > /i/ > /i/ > /i/
/e/ > /e/ > /e/ > /e/
/a/, /ä/, /ɒ̈/ > /a̠/, /a̠̹/ > /a̠/ > /a̠/
/ɜ/, /ɞ/ > /ɜ/ > /ɜ/ > /ɜ/
/ʉ/ > /ʉ/ > /ʉ/ > /i/ (in morae with /p t j/), /u/ (elsewhere)
/u/ > /u/ > /u/ > /u/
/o/ > /o/ > /o/ > /o/
/ɒ/ > /ɒ/ > /o/ (in morae with /b d w/, /a̠/ (elsewhere) > /o/, /a̠/
–––Phonotactics–––
Layamese is mora-timed, like Japanese, rather than stress timed like English and most other Germanic languages or syllable timed like most Romance languages, and moraic constraints define its syllable structure. A Layamese syllable can only be comprised of one or two morae, must contain a vowel, and cannot end in a consonant cluster.
A mora can be a consonant-vowel (CV) pair, a vowel-consonant pair (VC), a standalone vowel (V) either after CV pair or before a VC pair, a standalone consonant (C) after a CV pair, or a consonant cluster ending in a glide /j/ or /w/ (Cg, onset only) or affricate /tɕ/ or /dʑ/ (Af, coda only). There are around 200 theoretically allowable morae, although in practice many are not used in native words; the largest groups of unallowable morae are those that violate the rule that a mora cannot end in /f/, /s/, or /ɕ/, or rules involving consonant voicing and vowel frontedness, namely that voiceless /p/ and /t/ cannot occur in a mora with a back vowel while voiced /b/ and /d/ cannot occur in a mora with a front vowel. This also applies to the glides /j/ (treated as /i/) and /w/ (treated as /u/).
In the case of long (doubled) vowels, a moraic boundary can occur in the middle of the vowel sound, so kín "finger" and ú "owl" are effectively considered /ki·in/ and /u·u/. If kín were analysed as it is written, {ki}-{i}-{n} (the mora "ki", a long vowel mark, and the mora "n") it would be trimoraic syllable which is not permitted in Layamese. For the same reason long vowels cannot occur in syllables with a consonant-glide cluster, whether in the onset or coda.
Therefore, allowable syllables are, with colons to indicate mora boundaries;
V
V:V
V:Af
CV
CV:V
CV:C
CV:Af
Cg:V
VC
V:VC
Cg:VC
–––Grammar–––
(A lot of this is rough; grammar is something I'm pretty terrible at)
Layamese exhibits many common Northeast Asian areal features in its grammar; it is a highly regular agglutinative language with subject-object-verb preference in its word order and topic-comment sentence structure. Nouns are not inflected as such, although they can take on honorific prefixes, with case and topicality being marked by particles. Verbs are heavily inflected and adjectives take similar forms.
Case-marking particles of modern standard Layamese
| Case | After vowel | After consonant | Topic |
| Nominative | yó | ó | gi |
| Genitive | ru | ru | ru gi |
| Dative | yala | ala | yala gi, ala gi |
| tAccusative | ne | ne | ne gi |
| Lative | wei | ei | wei gi, ei gi |
| Ablative | dome | dome | dome gi |
| Instrumental | ga | ga | gaki |
Layamese verbs (donsi, Yanshi: 動詞) are always located at the end of a sentence, as in Korean and Japanese. Most adjectives in Layamese (yenyosi, Yanshi: 形容詞) are conjugated similary to verbs and are often referred to as "descriptive verbs" rather than as adjectives. Verb conjugation is extensively agglutinative with elements of fusionality, with affixes for politeness, tense-aspect, causativity-instrumentality, voice, mood, and negation. Regular verbs can have up to six affixes, seven depending on how honorific affixes are counted, mainly postfixed but in some verbs including prefixed honorifics.
There are four categories of regular Layamese verbs (including adjectives), with slight differences in conjugation. R-stem verbs always have plain forms ending in "-ri" (as such, the stem form always ends in "-r-"). Possible endings are "-ari", "-åri", "-uri", and "-ori"; "-iri" also appears, though in only the word "kiri" and a small number of Sino-Layamese words. R-stem verbs often have shared roots with nouns and include a large number of adjectives, including most basic color terms (for example "syuri" meaning "green"; this is also an example of a shared root ("syu-"), namely with "syun" meaning "leaf"). This is still productive, with the suffixes "-ari" ("-nari" when the noun it is being suffixed to ends in a vowel), and also encompassess all Sino-Layamese verbs.
There are also less common sh-stem ("-shi", "-sh-") and l-stem ("-li", "-l-") words, which conjugate identically to r-stem but only appear as adjectives. The suffixes "-ashi" and "-nashi" are still productive in creating adjectives from nouns, while the above "-ari"/"-nari" suffixes (although they can appear in adjectives themselves) are only used to create new verbs. Sh-stem adjectives are part of a relatively small class of words which contain the "sh" sound, along with some ideophones, particles, certain compounds, and Sino-Layamese and Atei loanwords.
Y/W-stem verbs have plain forms ending in either "-ya" or "-wa", with the corresponding stem form endings being "-y-" and "-w-". Most but not all begin with a consonant. Besides y/w-stem "common class" verbs there are two smaller related subclasses with identical or mostly identical conjugation. The first are k-stem verbs ("-ka" and -k-" endings), which derive from some verbs which in Middle Layamese and before were h-stem (other h-stem verbs became y-stem; generally speaking h-stem verbs with the vowels /u/ and /o/ became k-stem). The second are y/w-stem uncommon class verbs, which always begin with a vowel (although some common class y/w-stem verbs begin with a vowel as well) and differ in that they take the prefixed honorific "mun-".
Layamese verbs and adjectives have three different levels of honorific/politeness, referred to as x-honorific, m-honorific or mu-honorific, and s-honorific or su-honorific. The x-honorific form has no affix, the m- or mu-honorific form, depending on the word, has either the prefix "mun-" (in y/w-stem uncommon class verbs) or suffix "-munu", while the more polite s- or su-honorific form has either the suffix "-munusu" or, in words which take the prefix "mun-", the suffix "-su" ("-usu" if the preceding sound would be a consonant) along with prefixed "mun-" , making it a circumfix. Honorific suffixes are always word final.
Layamese has a set of instrumental affixes similar to those used in many North American languages. In Old Layamese this was seperate from the causative affix, but these became fused in Modern Layamese, with the instrumental affix "-aka-" ("with the hand") becoming a generic causative ending, and the affixes became more general and fewer in number. Causative-instrumental suffixes exhibit regular fusionality.
The instrumental suffixes in Modern Layamese are "-anka-" ("with the hand"; a coinage from "kan" meaning "hand", which was itself cognate with "-aka-" as well as with the instrumental case particle "ga"), "-ula-" ("with the foot", cognate with "mala" meaning "foot"), "-oru-" ("with the head, with the mind", cognate with "orui" meaning "head, mind"), "-oke-" ("with the leg/s, with the arm/s", cognate with "goge" meaning "limb, tree branch"), "-ogyo-" ("with a long object", also cognate with "goge"), "-eko-" ("with a sharp object, with the tip of a long object, cognate with "teko" meaning "thorn, needle"), "-usi-" ("with a small, short, or round object", cognate with "ulsi" meaning "stone"), and "-igyi-" ("with fire, by natural forces", cognate with "gyi" meaning "fire").
The corresponding causative-instrumental suffixes are "-aka-" or "-akagi- ("make/cause to be done with the hand"), "-ulgi-" ("make/cause to be done with the foot"), "-oti-" ("make/cause to be done with the head or mind, with a small, short, or round object"; this comes from conflating "-oru-" and "-usi-"), "-ityi-" ("make/cause to be done with the legs or arms", cognate with "atye" meaning "leg"; originally was the instrumental affix for "with the legs" while "-oke-" was exclusively "with the arms"), "-egi-" ("make/cause to be done with a long object, with a sharp object, with the tip of a long object"; this comes from conflating "-ogyo-" and "-eko-"), and "-igyigi-" ("make/cause to be done with fire or other forces").
The definite (and only) article in Layamese is the particle "ke", which is placed after a noun but before any case marking particles. The article has x-honorific, mu-honorific, and su-honorific forms similar to verbs; the mu-honorific form is "uki" or rarely "muki" while the su-honorific form is "ukisu", or "ukisun" if the following word starts with a vowel.
The definite article also creates a noun or verbal noun from a verb, very similar to the English suffix -ing. This is often connected to a noun it modifies with the genitive case particle ru, similarly to Japanese. Verbal nouns can decline for different levels of politeness by using different forms of ke. For example yusuri ("to relax") + ke for yusurike ("relaxtion, vacation").
(In practice creating verbal nouns – well, and a few other nouns that aren't derived from verbs – is most of what I've been doing with the definite article, although I also started using it as an element in family names the last round of additions to that list; for example Asake "(from/lives at) the estuary")
(The order of affixes in verb conjugations would be something like this)
(∞honorific)–0stem–1tense–2causative/instrumental–3voice–4mood–5negation–(6honorific)
–––Address–––
(Partly this was defined because in writing anime fanfiction I tend to maintain the honorifics characters use for each other, so when considering writing stuff for the language/setting by analogy, since the system of honorifics is similar to Japanese, I was going to use the Layamese honorifics in English)
Layamese has an intricate and interconnected system of pronouns, honorific terms of address, kinship terms, and demonstratives, which vary depending on social status, age, and gender.
Layamese extensively makes use of postnomial honorifics, similar to Japanese and Korean. As in Japanese and unlike Korean these are generally appended to, if not the full name, the surname rather than the given name. The most common and most general is "asagi" (elided form of asata "person" (itself from root sat- with honorific prefix a-) plus uki "the, this", roughly meaning "the honored person"), which is used for most people unrelated to the speaker, similarly to Japanese "san" or Korean "-ssi". In earlier usage (widespread in Early Modern Layamese and into the mid 20th century, originating in the court register of Classical Layamese) "asagi" was slightly less formal or polite than the corresponding "asagu" (for men) or "asaki" (for women), but this distinction is now almost nonexistent in speech and rare in writing. In speech and in compounds it is sometimes further abbreviated to "agi".
A further clipped form of "asagi", "sai" or "ai" is similar in use to Japanese "chan" or "kun" and somewhat similar to Korean "-a" or "-ya". "Sai" and "ai" are used between close friends or family or as terms of endearment. Similarly to Korean (although unlike the closest equivalents in Korean they are proper honorifics and not case markers) "sai" is attached to names ending in a vowel and "ai" is attached to names ending in a consonant. Unlike Japanese, they do not have a gendered association.
"Sai" and "ai" are also commonly used to created nicknames by appending them to part of a name or to a different reading of a character used in a name. For example, the name "Yunui" ("mountain hibiscus"; the common yanshi spelling would be 山槿) could become "Yussai" (adding the honorific to the first mora of the name), "Nuissai" (adding the honorific to the end of the name; note that in this case the part of the name taken crossed morpheme borders while in the first case only part of the first morpheme is taken) or "Kinai" (adding the honorific to the tyekota (Chinese-derived) reading of the second character in the name, 槿 "hibiscus").
A higher level of honorific, similar in use to Japanese "dono", is "kishi" (from kishada "lord, one's superior", itself ultimately from an elided form of kiri "high" plus sada "person", a word from the same root as "asata" used only in compounds). "Kishi" and its equivalents are used for people of the same or similar status to the speaker but is more respectful and formal than "asagi" and its variations. "Kishi" is used for women as well as men, but in the past (and rarely in modern usage) "kime" (formed similarly to "kishi" but with the suffix me "woman") was used for women. Other variations (sometimes seen as more polite or respectful, but largely used interchangably) were "akishi" and "akime", with the addition of the honorifc prefix a-.
The highest level of honorific in common modern usage is "kirugi" (elided form of kiri "high" plus uki, rough literal meaning being "the high one", with a more figurative translation being "my lord"), which is used for people of a higher status than the speaker, most comparable to Japanese "sama" or Korean "-nim". Gender distinction in Modern Layamese is stronger at this honorific level than at lower levels; although using "kirugi" for a woman is generally acceptable in speech, it is common (and in writing, preferred) to use "miyuki" (elided form of ayomi (omye "woman" plus honorific prefix ay-) plus uki, meaning roughly "the lady" or "my lady").
The commonly used honorific forms can be compared to the X-honorific, Mu-honorific, and Su-honorific level of verb conjugation, and generally in a sentence any personal honorific used should agree with the honorific conjugation. "ai/sai" is X-honorific, "asagi" is X- or Mu-honorific, "kishi" is Mu-honorific, and "kirugi" and "miyuki" are Su-honorific.
As in Japanese, occupational and official titles can be used as honorifics, alone or with another honorific term appended. These are generally Mu-honorific. There are also other, less general honorific terms, such "ayoshaji" (elided form of ayoshada "most knowledgable person" (orushi "intelligent" plus sada "person" with honorific/superlative prefix ay-" plus uki", roughly meaning "the most knowledgable one" and translatable to "doctor" or "master"), which is similar to Japanese "sensei", Chinese "sifu", Sanskrit "guru", or Tibetan "lama".
There is an even higher level of honorific in the term "akkishu" (elided form of kiri (with honorific prefix a-) plus ukisu "the, this" (ukisu is the Su-honorific form, in contrast to Mu-honorific "uki"), roughly meaning "the highmost one"). No longer in common use, it was historically used for members of the imperial family short of the emperor himself and for deities. It survives primarily in referring to gods, for example Yashieakkishu "the highmost one Yashie", and occasionally as a term of extraordinary respect, such as for historical national heroes. In the court register of Classical Layamese there was also feminine "akkishuye", but this has fallen out of use completely. Akkishu is less commonly used for other gods than for Yashie, emphasizing her role as first-among-equals in the Layamese pantheon.
–––Writing system–––
Lyammol ("Layamese language") in the Inamyo script.
Annotated in the Latin alphabet. Each character block is read top-to-bottom internally and then the blocks are read left-to-right. Letters can also appear on their own, as the syllable-final L in mol does here.
The script used to write Layamese phonemically is called Inamyo ("borrowed letters", from ina "borrowing" + myo "letter, writing"). The name is identical in meaning to Japanese "kana", and both scripts share a common origin of having evolved from Chinese characters (known as "yanshi" in Layamese) used to represent the phonemes of the vernacular language.
As with kana, the script represents morae rather than either phonemes or syllables, although it can also be used as an alphabet; the script consists of 21 letters, which have both moraic (known as shenshimu 整字母 "whole letter") forms (used when writing as individual phonemes, but in standard usage representing initial vowels in a VVC syllable or final sounds in a CVV or CVC syllable) and "combining" (pinshimu 份字母 "part-letter") forms, which are written as a vertical block similar to hangul (known as momoshimu 音字母 "sound letter" or "mora letter"). Inamyo can be classified as a semi-syllabary; it can be seen as more syllabic than Hangul as generally possible blocks besides the 150 used for morae existing in modern standard Layamese and less frequently the obsolete morae using {h} and {ü} are not used. Clusters not existing in Layamese and sometimes (non-Sinitic) loanwords in general can be represented in purely alphabetical writing.
The directionality of the script has always varied, with both Brahmic-influenced left-to-right, horizontal writing and Chinese-influenced vertical, right to left writing appearing from the earliest use of Inamyo in the 10th century. While the letter forms in Inamyo are derived from the Chinese script, the influence of the Brahmic scripts may be indicated by the fact that Inamyo's use of tall, narrow letters, which already appear in the earliest texts, has always been more suited to horizontal writing.
(Originally I think this explanation was just an attempt to solve an oversight I made in constructing inamyo as a horizontal left-to-right script from the beginning not really thinking about vertical writing)
In vertical writing, a number of different representations of shenshimu have been seen; in some texts they are written full width or almost full width, while sometimes henshimu rotated 90 degrees or stand-alone pinshimu were used instead, written in the center of the square block of space usually occupied by a Chinese character or momoshimu. Some texts even used stand-alone pinshimu exclusively, two to a space without regard for moraic boundaries, effectively using Inamyo as a purely vertical alphabet. By the late 18th century horizontal writing began to become more common, and by the early 20th century it was ubiquitous even in mixed texts using both Inamyo and yanshi.
Chinese characters (yanshi) can have both Sinitic and native readings, as in Japanese and Korean. The former is known as tyekota or tyekduk 冊讀 "book reading" and the later as molota 語讀 "speech reading".
There are two common romanization standards for Layamese; the newer Tyenpyuden-sik 政府定式 "government-established/official-style" is now more widely used particularly in Layam, and tends more towards a morphophonemic representation, while the older Upshaw system (in Layamese "Åpsha-sik") was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the west. Tyenpyuden-sik is a one-to-one representation of Inamyo spelling, while Upshaw is more phonetic and designed to be easier for a native reader of English to pronounce accurately.
The key differences are;
Upshaw transcribes /ɜ/ as "eu", rather than "å" as in tyenpyuden.
Upshaw transcribes /f/ and /s/ before /u/ and /o/ as "v" and "z", respectively, reflecting allophony which is not phonetically represented in tyenpyuden or Inamyo.
Upshaw transcribes /ɾ/ as "dy" rather than "ɽ" initially and intervocalically, and as "dh" finally. Therefore it captures allophonic /ʈ/ where tyenpyuden and Inamyo do not.
Upshaw transcribes /ɬ/ as "h" rather than "l" initially and intervocalically, and as "lh" finally. (By the time there was a systematized romanization /ç/ had already been lost in most dialects)
Upshaw transcribes /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ as "ch" and "j" respectively, both when they appear in the coda and when they appear allophonically before /i/ and /e/. In all positions, affricates are not distinguished from their counterpart consonant-glide clusters in Inamyo or in pure tyenpyuden.
Upshaw seperates vowel sequences with an apostrophe and transcribes long vowels with doubled letters, while tyenpyuden transcribes them with an acute accent on the vowel letter.
In the west, tyenpyuden is now the most commonly used standard as well, although generally "ky" and "gy" for /tɕ/ and /dʑ/ are sometimes substituted out for "ch" and "j". Personal names often use some Upshaw conventions, such as doubled vowels rather than accents and use of the digraph "eu" instead of "å".
(If I remember correctly I'd decided "Upshaw" was named something like John Charles Upshaw and that he was probably an Ivy League guy and/or a missionary)
The Shiwawan (lit. "Letter garland", Yanshi: 字花環) represents the homorganic order of the characters representing the 168 possible morae (166 characters) in the modern standard dialect of Layamese, along with 5 letters which cannot form a native mora on their own and a letter which denotes the vowel of the preceding character is doubled, for a total of 172 characters. The name "Shiwawan" is a calque into Sino-Layamese characters of Sanskrit "varṇamālā" (वर्णमाला), the name for the homorganic order of characters in the Brahmic scripts. The shiwawan itself follows this same order. On this chart, each character is arranged according to the homorganic script order, with characters not used in native words highlighted in green and empty blocks grayed out.
(This can also be consulted for tyenpyuden-sik romanized spelling; I don't have anything specific lying around for that)
Alphabetization in Layamese is based on the shiwawan, but is not identical to how the characters are ordered on it, in which each column for a vowel or glide sound is read in order, first the plain vowel letter, then all morae starting with it, then all morae ending with it, then moving to the next column, with plain consonant letters at the end (for example "am" is followed by "ka" and "fa" by "å"). Instead it is closer to an alphabetic order; words starting with a given plain vowel letter are first, then all morae starting with a vowel, then moving to the next vowel, with consonants (including glides) in order after, starting with the plain letter then all morae beginning with the letter and so on ("am" is followed by "å" and the last entries in a dictionary would be under "fo").
(I actually have a font and keyboard layout for this; it's a fully working script, although were it a real language it would have an IME whereas the best I could do somewhat easily was dead keys to form the character blocks similarly to how combining diacritics work which is fairly clumsy. The keyboard layout is Mac specific though and I don't know if anyone else here is both interested at all and uses Mac OS, and without the keyboard layout just having the font wouldn't do much because the letters have their own codepoints from the Unicode private use area instead of it being structured as a Latin cypher with the letters assigned to Latin letter codepoints, otherwise I'd probably put a download link.)
(There's a chart with all the glyphs which has more information on each letter, such as their derivation and which if any Japanese kana they are sibling characters, here. It also includes punctuation and various obsolete characters which were used to write phonemes which were lost in the modern standard language or to transcribe Chinese or other languages.)
–––Examples–––
I never worked out the verb conjugations fully, so the best examples I have of the language are all pretty short.
kiru yusurike yó sukamo
this relax-the-NOM stop-IMP
"stop this relxation!" or "stop relaxing!"
This demonstrates the use of a verbal noun suffixed with -ke.
min-uki gi mugiyegikumunu
child the-POLITE-TOPIC eat-with long object-CAUSATIVE-not-POLITE
"(as for) the child, (they) could not be made to eat with chopsticks"
This demonstrates a use of the instrumental affix as well as mu-honorific word forms. It's also a good example of topic-comment grammar, which is uncommon in English.
mugiyankakumunosuko
mugiy-anka-ku-munosuko
eat-with hands-not-POLITE
"please kindly do not eat with your hands"
This also demonstrates the instrumental affixes, as well as su-honorific. I mentioned this (along with a few other bits about the language) ages ago in my ask thread when Anton asked about words people had made up because it's a good example of how agglutination (and the fact that in a lot of non-English languages it's admissible to drop pronouns) can make a single word that acts as an entire decently sized sentence.
As with everything I make I'm perennially unsure how much I actually like this. I've also noticed that it suffers from, basically, me being too much of a weeb and most familiar with Japanese out of the languages I look at for influence (and I mainly looked at Japanese to begin with); namely the words I like more I feel are often ones that are closer to fitting Japanese phonotactics and I feel like that may have lead to me kind of not using the whole range of the language's own phonotactics much. In general especially with worldbuilding I feel like my ideas don't have much originality, although obviously there isn't really anything truly new and original in the world anyway.
If you quiz me on if I can explain half of this I won't be able to, but you can try anyway. I can't really read inamyo or pronounce some of the phonemes very well either.
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Snack
🌻Ashita wa nanika ga kawaru ka na?
- Thread starter
- #78
Basically this is the Shihori point of view version of the prologue tavern scene of Edo's DnD one-shot from back in March that we didn't really have time to fit in, and also I think the first time I've actually done anything for an OC birthday.
Again the Morning's Come
The chill had not fully left the air, but each day now was a bit warmer than the last, and good weather made her travels easier. There was a time she cared to say she had a favorite season, and in those long ago days it was always spring.
It was on such a day that she had come to the village, where the trees along the road had been cleared away, and ducked inside the door of a small shop, intrigued by the presence of a confectioner in so small a settlement. Shihori examined her plate, looking over the three pastries she'd bought for her lunch – for quite a price for a remote village at that – and having realized it was a bit more food than would suffice for one meal weighed which one to save for later.
There was a generous piece of a sort of cake, dotted with pieces of fruit and drizzled with icing, a round bun with a layer of thick syrup, and another round pastry dusted with sugar, cream filling visible at the seam between its two halves. The cake, she decided, looked sturdy and like it would hold up well, and so she slipped it into her pack before picking up the bun and taking a bite, a distinctive rich sweetness greeting her. She ate silently at her table in the far corner, instinct keeping one of her eyes on the surroundings, the proprietor cleaning and the young elvish woman and the tall, square-faced man eating at separate tables nearer the counter, no matter how welcome a rare moment of peace like this was.
Out of the corner of her eye she watched the proprietor set down his washcloth and walk over as she finished the bun.
"How are you enjoying everything, miss?", he said, stopping in front of her table.
"Quite well."
"Very good. Say, you wouldn't happen to be traveling east, would you?".
"What of it?", she asked, picking up the delicate, cream-filled pastry with the fingers of both hands and biting in to it.
"Well, it's just that it's been quite dangerous lately they say. We don't even see many travelers here these days with how it is." He paused and she took a another small bite, taking care not to let the filling spill out, leaving him to continue without the prompting he had expected. "...Robbery, kidnappings. Seems almost everyday you hear there's been someone taken for ransom."
Such things weren't too out of the ordinary for country roads, though perhaps it was worse than average.
"It's quite a problem. I've been making sure to warn anyone who comes through, and I'd tell you not to go that way if you can avoid it. If you're traveling on your own even more so."
She set the pastry down. "I appreciate the sentiment, but I shall be fine--," her eyes darted to her sword, leaned against the wall by the counter in its fine lacquer sheath next to a bow and polearm, too far from her hand and leaving her uneasy when she reminded herself of that. "--I have means to defend myself."
Some she dared not speak of.
"Oh, certainly. Still, fair warning. And I'll be sure to return your sword when you leave."
Shihori nodded, saying nothing, and after staying put a second longer he left, stopping to listen to a question the young woman asked.
She returned to eating in peace, soon finishing her meal but lingering at the table, flipping idly through her notes and gazing at blue skies out the lattice window beside her. Were it not for the ingrained sense of propriety of Sonozaki no Shihori, noble daughter of a feudal lord, still nagging at her she might have slumped down on the table, resting her head on crossed arms.
She had heard rumors of this region, that it had been the home of a mage of incredible power who could rive the earth and bend the will of even the gods, but some hadn't even heard of the legend, and those who had told her that had been a very, very long time ago.
Like so many of her efforts, little to show.
Finally she got up, walking to the door and mouthing a 'thank you' to the proprietor as he came over from the counter and returned her sword, the bells on the door jingling as she stepped out, slipping the sheath into her obi and securing it in place as she went on her way. It really was the picture of spring, cool air and chirping birds, bright sun and blue skies with distant towering white clouds. If she let it, it might take her right back to those days sitting on the porch in the courtyard with her father or mother, or the tutor who taught her the rules of poetry.
"...Myaa."
Something brushed against her and she stopped, glancing down at the cat at her feet and then crouching by it, holding out her hand and feeling them nuzzle their head against her palm.
"Are you hungry?", Shihori asked, patting their head and getting another weak meow back. The cat was rail thin, orange fur dirty and matted, clearly underfed and probably a stray. She reached for her pack to look for food.
She paused. Of course, cats were exclusive carnivores, and none of the provisions in her pack, dry biscuits, bags of nuts and seeds, hard cheese and yogurt – and the leftover slice of stollen – were appropriate food for one.
"...Stay here." She gave the cat's head another pat and stood up, turning and walking back to the shop as she heard one more pleading whine. She recalled they'd had bread and sandwiches as well as pastries, and so it was as good a place as any to try.
The proprietor gave her an odd, almost worried look from the counter as she pulled open the door, bells again jingling.
"...I didn't think you'd be back so soon," he said. Well, she hadn't even finished everything she'd bought, so she supposed it was was an understandable reaction.
Reluctantly she removed her sword as she stepped inside, laying it on an unoccupied table by the door.
"...I wanted to buy meat or fish, if you would please."
He scratched his head, and her eyes darted away to the door as she heard the bells ring, a tiefling woman stepping through it, before returning to him. "Just meat or fish? I suppose we stock it, but... Well, how would you like it?".
"Raw is fine."
She could have sworn she saw an odd smirk flash on the woman's face just an instant as she stepped by her.
"Err, well... Let's say one silver for that, if you're certain."
Shihori glanced aside. "It's... Not for me."
Scratching his head again, he vanished into the back room as she walked to the counter and laid a coin on it, returning with a fish wrapped in a thin sheet of paper and handing it to her.
"Thank you... I suppose it was an odd request."
"I'm happy enough to do business," he said. "Not many travelers on the road to stop by lately, you know?".
She nodded.
The cat had stayed put while she wasn't there, still sitting where they were when she'd left and looking hopefully up at her as she returned and crouched again, setting the paper on the ground by the side of the road and opening it, a whole smallish, silvery fish inside. It felt like good luck that the shop had fresh fish on this particular day, too. The cat tiptoed closer, tentatively sniffing it.
"...You don't like it?", she asked.
Seeming satisfied, the cat bit in to the fish's flank and started eating. Or perhaps they did.
Shihori smiled a little. It would soon pass, she knew, but despite her setbacks, for now she was in an uncommonly good mood.
"More uselessness today, Sonozaki no Shihori. How dull."
Like that it was gone. A chill ran down her spine at the icy whisper in the back of her head. She hadn't heard it in days now, long enough that the fear it would soon make itself known again had softened and she'd become at times something almost like comfortable.
She stood up and planted her feet, pushing the worry from her mind and steeling herself.
"And more uselessness every day I wish for it," she answered.
"Not concerned with time anymore, my friend?", the voice taunted. She clicked her tongue and let out a deep sigh, loud enough that the cat stopped eating and looked up at her before returning to their fish.
Shihori leaned over and reassuringly patted them on the head before standing straight and walking across the margin of grass that separated the road from the trees, sitting down in the shade of one and turning her eyes up at the sky, looking at those towering white clouds through the leaves. She set her pack in front of her and opened it up, digging around and producing the hourglass, deceptively plain looking, dark metal without elaborate loops or inlaid jewels, holding it up to study it.
The grains of sand fell slowly, the rate unchanging no matter how she reoriented it and she no longer had the curiosity to try, so slowly it took close examination to see them, occasionally breaking away and drifting through the neck like falling leaves. It told her nothing she didn't know, but it was a little less than half drained now. It had been just about four years now since her escape.
And five remained.
She returned it to her pack. Soon she would be on the road again, but at times like these she found it good to do something to occupy her mind a while and ease the weariness that came all too readily.
Shihori took her notebook, pen, and ink, flipping to a blank page and recalling the cream-filled pastry, and began to sketch.
______________________________
Notes
Again the Morning's Come
The chill had not fully left the air, but each day now was a bit warmer than the last, and good weather made her travels easier. There was a time she cared to say she had a favorite season, and in those long ago days it was always spring.
It was on such a day that she had come to the village, where the trees along the road had been cleared away, and ducked inside the door of a small shop, intrigued by the presence of a confectioner in so small a settlement. Shihori examined her plate, looking over the three pastries she'd bought for her lunch – for quite a price for a remote village at that – and having realized it was a bit more food than would suffice for one meal weighed which one to save for later.
There was a generous piece of a sort of cake, dotted with pieces of fruit and drizzled with icing, a round bun with a layer of thick syrup, and another round pastry dusted with sugar, cream filling visible at the seam between its two halves. The cake, she decided, looked sturdy and like it would hold up well, and so she slipped it into her pack before picking up the bun and taking a bite, a distinctive rich sweetness greeting her. She ate silently at her table in the far corner, instinct keeping one of her eyes on the surroundings, the proprietor cleaning and the young elvish woman and the tall, square-faced man eating at separate tables nearer the counter, no matter how welcome a rare moment of peace like this was.
Out of the corner of her eye she watched the proprietor set down his washcloth and walk over as she finished the bun.
"How are you enjoying everything, miss?", he said, stopping in front of her table.
"Quite well."
"Very good. Say, you wouldn't happen to be traveling east, would you?".
"What of it?", she asked, picking up the delicate, cream-filled pastry with the fingers of both hands and biting in to it.
"Well, it's just that it's been quite dangerous lately they say. We don't even see many travelers here these days with how it is." He paused and she took a another small bite, taking care not to let the filling spill out, leaving him to continue without the prompting he had expected. "...Robbery, kidnappings. Seems almost everyday you hear there's been someone taken for ransom."
Such things weren't too out of the ordinary for country roads, though perhaps it was worse than average.
"It's quite a problem. I've been making sure to warn anyone who comes through, and I'd tell you not to go that way if you can avoid it. If you're traveling on your own even more so."
She set the pastry down. "I appreciate the sentiment, but I shall be fine--," her eyes darted to her sword, leaned against the wall by the counter in its fine lacquer sheath next to a bow and polearm, too far from her hand and leaving her uneasy when she reminded herself of that. "--I have means to defend myself."
Some she dared not speak of.
"Oh, certainly. Still, fair warning. And I'll be sure to return your sword when you leave."
Shihori nodded, saying nothing, and after staying put a second longer he left, stopping to listen to a question the young woman asked.
She returned to eating in peace, soon finishing her meal but lingering at the table, flipping idly through her notes and gazing at blue skies out the lattice window beside her. Were it not for the ingrained sense of propriety of Sonozaki no Shihori, noble daughter of a feudal lord, still nagging at her she might have slumped down on the table, resting her head on crossed arms.
She had heard rumors of this region, that it had been the home of a mage of incredible power who could rive the earth and bend the will of even the gods, but some hadn't even heard of the legend, and those who had told her that had been a very, very long time ago.
Like so many of her efforts, little to show.
Finally she got up, walking to the door and mouthing a 'thank you' to the proprietor as he came over from the counter and returned her sword, the bells on the door jingling as she stepped out, slipping the sheath into her obi and securing it in place as she went on her way. It really was the picture of spring, cool air and chirping birds, bright sun and blue skies with distant towering white clouds. If she let it, it might take her right back to those days sitting on the porch in the courtyard with her father or mother, or the tutor who taught her the rules of poetry.
"...Myaa."
Something brushed against her and she stopped, glancing down at the cat at her feet and then crouching by it, holding out her hand and feeling them nuzzle their head against her palm.
"Are you hungry?", Shihori asked, patting their head and getting another weak meow back. The cat was rail thin, orange fur dirty and matted, clearly underfed and probably a stray. She reached for her pack to look for food.
She paused. Of course, cats were exclusive carnivores, and none of the provisions in her pack, dry biscuits, bags of nuts and seeds, hard cheese and yogurt – and the leftover slice of stollen – were appropriate food for one.
"...Stay here." She gave the cat's head another pat and stood up, turning and walking back to the shop as she heard one more pleading whine. She recalled they'd had bread and sandwiches as well as pastries, and so it was as good a place as any to try.
The proprietor gave her an odd, almost worried look from the counter as she pulled open the door, bells again jingling.
"...I didn't think you'd be back so soon," he said. Well, she hadn't even finished everything she'd bought, so she supposed it was was an understandable reaction.
Reluctantly she removed her sword as she stepped inside, laying it on an unoccupied table by the door.
"...I wanted to buy meat or fish, if you would please."
He scratched his head, and her eyes darted away to the door as she heard the bells ring, a tiefling woman stepping through it, before returning to him. "Just meat or fish? I suppose we stock it, but... Well, how would you like it?".
"Raw is fine."
She could have sworn she saw an odd smirk flash on the woman's face just an instant as she stepped by her.
"Err, well... Let's say one silver for that, if you're certain."
Shihori glanced aside. "It's... Not for me."
Scratching his head again, he vanished into the back room as she walked to the counter and laid a coin on it, returning with a fish wrapped in a thin sheet of paper and handing it to her.
"Thank you... I suppose it was an odd request."
"I'm happy enough to do business," he said. "Not many travelers on the road to stop by lately, you know?".
She nodded.
The cat had stayed put while she wasn't there, still sitting where they were when she'd left and looking hopefully up at her as she returned and crouched again, setting the paper on the ground by the side of the road and opening it, a whole smallish, silvery fish inside. It felt like good luck that the shop had fresh fish on this particular day, too. The cat tiptoed closer, tentatively sniffing it.
"...You don't like it?", she asked.
Seeming satisfied, the cat bit in to the fish's flank and started eating. Or perhaps they did.
Shihori smiled a little. It would soon pass, she knew, but despite her setbacks, for now she was in an uncommonly good mood.
"More uselessness today, Sonozaki no Shihori. How dull."
Like that it was gone. A chill ran down her spine at the icy whisper in the back of her head. She hadn't heard it in days now, long enough that the fear it would soon make itself known again had softened and she'd become at times something almost like comfortable.
She stood up and planted her feet, pushing the worry from her mind and steeling herself.
"And more uselessness every day I wish for it," she answered.
"Not concerned with time anymore, my friend?", the voice taunted. She clicked her tongue and let out a deep sigh, loud enough that the cat stopped eating and looked up at her before returning to their fish.
Shihori leaned over and reassuringly patted them on the head before standing straight and walking across the margin of grass that separated the road from the trees, sitting down in the shade of one and turning her eyes up at the sky, looking at those towering white clouds through the leaves. She set her pack in front of her and opened it up, digging around and producing the hourglass, deceptively plain looking, dark metal without elaborate loops or inlaid jewels, holding it up to study it.
The grains of sand fell slowly, the rate unchanging no matter how she reoriented it and she no longer had the curiosity to try, so slowly it took close examination to see them, occasionally breaking away and drifting through the neck like falling leaves. It told her nothing she didn't know, but it was a little less than half drained now. It had been just about four years now since her escape.
And five remained.
She returned it to her pack. Soon she would be on the road again, but at times like these she found it good to do something to occupy her mind a while and ease the weariness that came all too readily.
Shihori took her notebook, pen, and ink, flipping to a blank page and recalling the cream-filled pastry, and began to sketch.
______________________________
Notes
I was in extremely melancholy mood today/yesterday (once again I've stayed up to an even more ridiculous time than usual because I got to working on something and didn't want to sleep until I was done), and it happened that the next day/today was Shihori's birthday. I hadn't actually written that down at all let alone mentioned it, but I'd been thinking about character birthdays a while ago and decided I should try and think of them for my DnD characters since they didn't have them (except I think I'd decided a while back that Granya had a summer birthday; I didn't really concretely decide on one for her now either but it's probably in July, I had been thinking July 7) and felt like Shihori should have a spring birthday for some reason, so I ended up pretty much settling on June 1st, and it definitely has to be canon now that I've done something to mark it. She's nothing if not a melancholy mood so I was inspired to finally write the scene with the cat that had been in my head a while, partly because I didn't feel like tackling the ideas I have for a big thing about her backstory and the unrelated huge project I always feel called to finish when I feel bad is something daunting in scope that I keep feeling is beyond my abilities.
This isn't really a great birthday present certainly, although I'm not sure Shihori would mark her birthday herself anyway; I don't know that birthday celebrations were a thing outside of the west before fairly recently and I believe generally in East Asia your age was considered to increment on the New Year (although, and I either forgot or most likely didn't know this, there was a specific celebration for first birthdays).
I thought about putting this in the DnD thread since it's more linked to the campaign than the stories I've written for Granya and not written as an introduction to the character at all and doesn't fully make sense without knowing what happened in the one-shot and probably also remembering backstory stuff I've mentioned elsewhere (even just having read Shihori's Recollections it might be confusing since I wrote those in a sort of vague way), but I decided I wanted to put it together with my other stuff. The gist of it basically is that (I dunno why I'm tagging this but) she's the descendant of an ancient dragon god who was kidnapped to be made into the dragon's vessel to revive him, and also they partly succeeded so she only has so much time to figure out how to remove his soul from her before she basically dies, which is what the enchanted hourglass is counting.
I know tfp said Yuna would definitely be going to the cake shop and I assume GBA would be too, but I don't actually know whether Jotham did or didn't (or whether Kursim didn't, although he could just have been there at a different time or, given Edo mentioned Aligra has multiple cake shops, visited a different one; he doesn't seem to have run in to Yuna before we met on the path looking at the logs again). Edo mentioned that in particular Aligra sells fruit cakes and Anton mentioned he thought they would be stollen so I went with that, as well as some sort of maple bun because I had ran with that in Shihori's Recollections and a donut or cream puff of some sort.
Incidentally this scene explains Shihori's reaction to the mountain lion. She doesn't really like people but she likes cats. The title is from the Allman Brothers Band song Melissa, which I first listened to just about a year ago now (I remember I listened it to it a lot writing the new Rideable Minecart High School omake) and since then have kept wanting to use something from that part of the lyrics as a title for something or other.
This isn't really a great birthday present certainly, although I'm not sure Shihori would mark her birthday herself anyway; I don't know that birthday celebrations were a thing outside of the west before fairly recently and I believe generally in East Asia your age was considered to increment on the New Year (although, and I either forgot or most likely didn't know this, there was a specific celebration for first birthdays).
I thought about putting this in the DnD thread since it's more linked to the campaign than the stories I've written for Granya and not written as an introduction to the character at all and doesn't fully make sense without knowing what happened in the one-shot and probably also remembering backstory stuff I've mentioned elsewhere (even just having read Shihori's Recollections it might be confusing since I wrote those in a sort of vague way), but I decided I wanted to put it together with my other stuff. The gist of it basically is that (I dunno why I'm tagging this but) she's the descendant of an ancient dragon god who was kidnapped to be made into the dragon's vessel to revive him, and also they partly succeeded so she only has so much time to figure out how to remove his soul from her before she basically dies, which is what the enchanted hourglass is counting.
I know tfp said Yuna would definitely be going to the cake shop and I assume GBA would be too, but I don't actually know whether Jotham did or didn't (or whether Kursim didn't, although he could just have been there at a different time or, given Edo mentioned Aligra has multiple cake shops, visited a different one; he doesn't seem to have run in to Yuna before we met on the path looking at the logs again). Edo mentioned that in particular Aligra sells fruit cakes and Anton mentioned he thought they would be stollen so I went with that, as well as some sort of maple bun because I had ran with that in Shihori's Recollections and a donut or cream puff of some sort.
Incidentally this scene explains Shihori's reaction to the mountain lion. She doesn't really like people but she likes cats. The title is from the Allman Brothers Band song Melissa, which I first listened to just about a year ago now (I remember I listened it to it a lot writing the new Rideable Minecart High School omake) and since then have kept wanting to use something from that part of the lyrics as a title for something or other.
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