to tell me
about it.)Posted by Philip Newton on 00:58 9/15/01
In reply to: Hmm... Ket elusu? posted by Irgend Jemand on 13:47 9/14/01
Mark wrote:
A surprising number-- less than a dozen, but still astonishing-- of people have written to me or posted here in Verdurian. I never know how well they can deal with a response in Verdurian, however!
Well, it usually takes me about an hour to compose a message in Verdurian. (Cadhinor takes even longer; the last message Niuman debutio took me about two hours.) When I've finished writing a message, I can usually read most of it without having to reach for the dictionary again :). However, reading a post from someone else that's only in Verdurian -- even if it's only a sentence or two, perhaps in a reply from Mark -- usually entails printing the page out in a large font size and then getting out my dictionary and writing translations above each word. Then, when I've done that, I can understand what's written, but it takes a while. So if, say, two new messages a day would be posted in Verdurian, that would start getting too much to handle :).
(Note to self: I really should get around to learning the endings of verb conjugations -- after all, there are only eighteen. It would save having to turn to my conjugator all the time to check the ending.)
I don't know whether I've announced it here yet: I wrote some tools
for conjugating and declining verbs, nouns, and adjectives in Verdurian, Cadhinor, and Cuêzi. Feel
free to use them if you want to check up on an ending while writing or
for whatever reason. They also help for irregular nouns or verbs. And
you can also use the
tool I use to generate PNGs of Verdurian text. (And if you find a
mistake in the output, or would like some help using the tools, feel
free to write to me at to tell me
about it.)
The picture maker is especially rough, since the interface is kind of designed for the developer, not for an end user. Play around a bit if you want. However, two tips: "Maraille" font is Verdurian-in-Roman- letters but with sh ch etc. shown as s-with-caron c-with-caron etc., and "Verdurian" font is Verdurian-in-Verdurian-letters. Paragraphs should be separated by a blank line in the input, and HTML entities such as á are also accepted.
Cheers,
Philip
And very neat toys they are, too! I was wondering how you made those graphics. You must have made your own font, too, since it's blockier than mine.
Glimpse behind the scenes: I did try to keep Verdurian relatively learnable... relative to my other languages, I mean (evil chuckle). There are patterns to the endings. (On the other hand, there are also irregularities that are hard to explain, but are too dispersed to change. Part of why I wrote the Language Construction Kit was to help others to avoid all the mistakes I made...)