I don't want this to sound too geeky and obsessive, so let me say first that I've had an interest in invented languages for a while now.
So. In AWD, when Nita meets Pont for the first time, Pont says "Dai stiheh!" The obvious reason for the change from the usual "dai stiho" is that Pont thinks Nita is plural, like themselves. (Argh, pronouns for Pont get very confusing...) Several Terran languages (Latin, for one) have different verb forms for singular and plural imperative sentences.
But just a page or two later, Nita passes *two* wizards and says "Dai stiho" to them. Aaaah! Probably just a mistake, although there are some plausible explanations you could suggest: the change doesn't mark plurality at all, but something Earth languages probably don't even have a name for; the phrase is so common Nita's just used to the singular version; the change does mark plurality, but it's the speaker's plurality, not the addressee's (seems odd, but after all, the idea of a plural speaker isn't going to come up much in human languages)...
Nevertheless, from these two examples you can draw a few very tentative conclusions about the Speech:
-dai is probably the adverb ("well") and stih- is the verb root ("go") (Could've figured this out before, actually, since it's not very likely that people would go around saying "Go!" as a casual hello/goodbye...)
-Modifiers (adjectives and adverbs, mostly) tend to come before the words they modify - a "head-final language" in linguistics geek terms. (But remember many human languages are very inconsistent about this.)
-Plurality (or maybe some other element) is marked by suffixes added onto the end of the verb root.
Heh. I love this stuff. Dai stiheh, all!
So. In AWD, when Nita meets Pont for the first time, Pont says "Dai stiheh!" The obvious reason for the change from the usual "dai stiho" is that Pont thinks Nita is plural, like themselves. (Argh, pronouns for Pont get very confusing...) Several Terran languages (Latin, for one) have different verb forms for singular and plural imperative sentences.
But just a page or two later, Nita passes *two* wizards and says "Dai stiho" to them. Aaaah! Probably just a mistake, although there are some plausible explanations you could suggest: the change doesn't mark plurality at all, but something Earth languages probably don't even have a name for; the phrase is so common Nita's just used to the singular version; the change does mark plurality, but it's the speaker's plurality, not the addressee's (seems odd, but after all, the idea of a plural speaker isn't going to come up much in human languages)...
Nevertheless, from these two examples you can draw a few very tentative conclusions about the Speech:
-dai is probably the adverb ("well") and stih- is the verb root ("go") (Could've figured this out before, actually, since it's not very likely that people would go around saying "Go!" as a casual hello/goodbye...)
-Modifiers (adjectives and adverbs, mostly) tend to come before the words they modify - a "head-final language" in linguistics geek terms. (But remember many human languages are very inconsistent about this.)
-Plurality (or maybe some other element) is marked by suffixes added onto the end of the verb root.
Heh. I love this stuff. Dai stiheh, all!
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