Celinese

I’ve digitised the 5000th word to the Celinese dictionary. Since I’ve started looking through political manuscripts, there have been some unusual words recently, including the mammoth (by Celinese standards) mairtysysroimerbythoê and neifeloisroimerbythoê - sexism and ageism. Luckily, prejudices such as these are rare in Celinophone societies, otherwise it would be a nightmare to type them all the time!

The 5000th word - conservatism - is hiðorcylothín, coming from hiðor “yesterday” + cyllí “to keep” + nothín “idea, concept”. In sum, the concept of keeping yesterday.

My favourite word out of the last thousand to be digitised is probably aðalyra, an adjective describing something that is beautiful but sad.

Last week, I talked about Jinyero/Esfoth, a country that is partially Celinophone, and introduced information about Jinyera Tôla, its original language. This week, we’ll be taking a look at Esfotheg, a Celinese variety that is the country’s other major official language. Whilst it is closely linked to Celinese dialects of the South-East of Elitho, some elements of the language can appear rather different to standard Celinese to the untrained eye. This is due to an array of reasons:

• Esfotheg is based on the Celinese dialects of the Southern Borderlands, which in themselves are rather distinct from the Periso-Ioðinbêr standard.
• A seperate Jinyer-Celinese dialect began being developed some 420 years ago, with the first mass Elitho settlements in Western Jinyero. This grew more disparate in time, incorporating Jinyer loanwords and being influenced by the unusual blend of several Southern dialects. 
• Having originated in Early Modern Celinese, the language did not undergo some of the sound changes present in Contemporary Modern Celinese.
• Esfotheg has had its own academy of language for 270 years. For the last 150 years or so, it has pursued a policy of maximal divergence, whereby reflecting how the language is pronounced in Jinyero is prioritised over interintelligibility with other Celinese variants.

Some information on Esfotheg:

• The varient’s vowel phonology has a few prominent differences to that of Standard Celinese: there is no /ø/ or /i/ (<i> is pronounced /əʏ/) or /ɪ/ (<y> is pronounced /ʏ/). SC’s /e/ and /ɛ/ have merged into /e̞/ and /ɔ/ and /o/ have merged into /o̞/. This means that diagraphs are only needed to mark stress, not to distinguish vowel quality. Traditionally, an acute was used to mark this, but these days, a circumflex is used instead whenever the stress falls on a syllable other than the penult. Examples: Standard Celinese édithoê, mulíg, ganlús (medicine, foreign, please) > Esfotheg êdithuye, mulôth, ginlûs.
• <c> is always pronounced /k/ and <g> is always /g/, unlike in most variants of the language. Final <r> is not pronounced as /ʐ/, but as /ɻ/, as is common in the Southern Borderlands. There is no palatalisation or fricativisation (Standard Celinese sí, pronounced /ʃi/ in most dialects, is si /səʏ/).
• A fair few elements of the derivational morphology are slightly different: oê turns to uye, -eg and -ig (the adjectival endings) turn to oth/ôth, and the ending -os is relatively unheard of, usually replaced with -së or -ar. The third person singular of verbs is not <ío>, but <il>.
• A few interesting sound changes characterise the language. These include:
  
  -  a merger between w and f (the latter historically pronounced /ʋ/ in Esfoth and the South-East) as /w/. The Middle Celinese root *fynro became fyno in most dialects of Modern Celinese, but wynt in Esfotheg and in Non-Ioðinbêr Southern dialects.
  
  - <c> and <ch> merging in final position (as /χ/ or /ʁ/).
  
  - Some preservations from Middle Celinese. /hy/ turned to /we/ in most dialects - e.g. wercas, urge or welèc, north-east - but in Esfotheg, these words start with /hʏ/ - and are written hyrcas and hylêch respectively.

Things are pretty hectic in my professional life at the moment, but I found a quiet few minutes to translate this classic by Elizabeth Barrett Browning into Celinese, into the stricter style of leiðoê no less. You can hear it being read out at this link. You can read the English original here.

Sonethot go lysitheg

Selmat

Chyntús mé, ofor teimí ðo gwanois
Na d-to scenos sochí fyðí. Nélois,
Na wyðar go r-elois ainheg, fyðí
Ichrosain go mo syrth lylthí polí;

Daich na séillairel mo w-flarë wylí
Heðwast, fent an beroðig cêis teimí:
To wyros na mo w-folom. Escorío
Chemol ðo tír tont terainig tysúo.

Na mo g-caroig cymís ðyseg; ðéðo 
Fí ar nolothí nocynlíoth, olso
Tysor ceraig enothig sofen sío.

Célois prachí, to r-ethol Ter cluthío,
Ar na r-inðot, laimot go dwy daisío. 

I’m back after a week or so of terrible business - as a teacher, the end of term is always hectic, spent desperately trying to get kids to produce a few words of French/German so that they do not fail. On the flipside, my first day of vacation was dedicated to - naturally - updating my online Celinese documents! There’s a whole lot of new stuff available, and I’ll be adding a few more things over here tomorrow (including our next idiom of the day) with any luck.

Somewhat shiny new things -

• Have you ever wondered where you would feel most at home in the Celinese world? Probably not, but it did not stop me from making this quiz. Eight multiple choice questions will determine where suits you best out of six choices. (Note - some answers aren’t tystír, but regions, and there are 36 rather than six tystírain!) After choosing, you’ll get some information about the region that you’ve chosen, and about the people there.
• Like the months of the year, the days of the week have names unique to Celinese. Unlike the months, the day names were relatively modern inventions, made up because every tystír had their own conventions. National names plus some local equivalents are all talked about here.
• Information about Celinese prefixes can be found here - and here’s a quiz about word building in general.
• There’s also a range of smaller updates.

The flag of modern Elitho, whose colours (top to bottom) represent peace, longevity and friendship/familial ties.

I’ve made a few Celinese-relevant posts on Nêgelínec, my blog for languages from the Celinophone world that aren’t Celinese varieties. Today I’ve focused on one of Elitho’s closest neighbours, Jinyero, and its language isolate. The histories of these two countries are rather closely connected, but the languages are very different indeed:

An Introduction to the History of Jinyero

A Brief Introduction to Jinyera, the nation’s majority language