Spending the afternoon reworking the former Ittahoe, which, under the new rules, is now Ittanyo. Even got it to a good enough point to translate the Lord's Prayer. So here it is!
The Lord's Prayer
Ran madibanyo tadoga mo ri.
Tia pina saroba.
Padira ye padoga naginal ko ye ndaristal anocha talo.
Adia tarobanyo tat yeda tidat,
ye ngadia ndanochanyo tap tipta sa,
wo madia ndanochano tap mbalombe adia lanocha tap tapto tipta sa.
ye parolan tia tila sa,
tu pidabo tia talo.
You are our father in heaven.
We praise your name.
On earth and in heaven, let your kingdom come and your will be done.
Give us today our bread of the day,
and do not charge our bad deeds to us,
as we do not charge the bad deeds of those who incur debt against us against them,
and do not lead us into temptation,
but free us from evil.
The Old Version
The original version was based on two main ideas: 1. that every inflectional form would be accomplished by changes in syllable structure (retaining the same phonemes, but re-ordering them into different syllable structures without adding or taking away anything), and 2. That the main inflections would be for "valency" of both nouns and verbs. That is, verbs would rearrange their syllable structure depending on how many arguments they took, and nouns would rearrange theirs depending on how many verbs to which they acted as arguments. I kind of liked how this made relative clauses extremely easy, so that you could say something like: Man woman love see = The man sees the woman (whom) he loves. You could tell that 'man' was the subject of both verbs by its form, and 'woman' was the object of the same two verbs. It was a cool system, but I wanted to try a slightly different approach.
The New Version
In the new version, I took some inspiration from Bantu noun-class prefixes, and another (though similar) idea I had had before: to create a language where nouns in relative clauses would have different case-marking than those in main clauses. I used prefixes inspired by Bantu noun-classes to indicate this. It is somewhat similar to the previous version, in that the important feature of noun inflection is which verb or verbs it is an argument for, but prefixes, rather than rearranged syllable-structure indicate this now. A good example is the first sentence of the Lord's Prayer above.
Ran ma- diba -nyo ta- doga mo ri.
You nom/nom- father -our obl.REL- heaven be.located are
nom/nom = nominative of both verbs.
obl.REL = oblique argument of the verb in the relative clause.
Note: I realized after posting that I forgot an entire line: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I'll fix that and post the corrected version when finished.
