There are three categories of partitives in Lilitika:
(a) constructions where a set, general term exists; these are usually vague cases such as "some of the people" or "half of the night"
(b) constructions where a reference must be made to a specific quantity or fraction, e.g. "three of the walnuts" or "ten percent of the battery"
(c) constructions where a reference must be made to a subset which is distinguished by some attribute, e.g. "the wisest of the philosophers" or "the oldest (parts) of the tree" […]
(a) constructions where a set, general term exists; these are usually vague cases such as "some of the people" or "half of the night"
(b) constructions where a reference must be made to a specific quantity or fraction, e.g. "three of the walnuts" or "ten percent of the battery"
(c) constructions where a reference must be made to a subset which is distinguished by some attribute, e.g. "the wisest of the philosophers" or "the oldest (parts) of the tree" […]
Lilitika now has 2000 roots! The two thousandth root is strezyé, "to bless."
(This article was originally written about a week ago. A mindless Baidu crawler deleted it, much to my horror. Hopefully that won't happen again.)
Lilitika intentionally takes strongly after ancient Greek in several respects, most obviously in the personality of its consonants and some of its endings. A week or two ago I was investigating classical sources in search of new mechanisms through which it might be possible to give the language a greater expressive power, and I stumbled upon the aorist. […]
Lilitika intentionally takes strongly after ancient Greek in several respects, most obviously in the personality of its consonants and some of its endings. A week or two ago I was investigating classical sources in search of new mechanisms through which it might be possible to give the language a greater expressive power, and I stumbled upon the aorist. […]
After much consternation and a survey of classical Latin and Greek, it's come to my attention that the current form of Lilitic completely misses the Latin instrumental ablative, Greek instrumental dative, and Greek proper dative cases. Much ado has been made of the locative, which has six forms (from/at/toward, since/while/until) but there's still no "with" or "unto" in Lilitic! […]
One of the hardest challenges in designing an alien language is coming up with grammatical features that are genuinely alien in nature. It's easy to say something like "hey look RPN; that's extremely alien to my feeble linguist mind" (unless you are Dutch, in which case this is no surprise) and resort to grammars that are, in fact, all too human—after all, humans wrote the Java VM. […]
