Standard script

Brainiac · December 21, 2009, 04:40:22 AM

Quote from: Eywa-ri 'eveng on December 21, 2009, 03:44:26 AM
Edit: I have just a question about the writing of the Na'vi language. We often see some things like that...for example when you wanna say a long river you can it like that "ngim-a kilvan". But my question is the following, do we have to write like that or this is just to see the grammatical part being stressed? Is "ngima kilvan" the way it has to be written then?

every time I see someone write something like "ngim-a", they usually refer to things like "ngim'a".
I'm not sure,though, so feel free to correct me.

Elysio · December 21, 2009, 05:36:39 AM

I don't think it's for the stress, and i don't think it's for the apostrophe (which is here a letter, so why hiding it ?) either. The "a" in ngima is a suffixe which is attaching the adjective to the noun. So i just think it's a way of understanding better what we write (and read). It may be the same with the cases of nouns.

Karyu Amawey · December 21, 2009, 10:24:35 AM

It is the Na''Vi sense of agreement with nouns, that way one understands that it belongs to that noun and not another.

Karyu Amawey · December 21, 2009, 11:24:09 AM

Due to confusion from the first PDF for the Na''Vi language learner, I decided to vamp it up with first a lexicon of standardized Na''Vi followed by an IPA Lexicon of Na'Vi. I also touched a few things up and color coated some more for easier learning! Let me know if there is anymore confusion!

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BxURBDXVBWhHZTFlNjVhM2UtM2YyNi00NDRiLTllYmYtZGQ3ZTcxMjU1NDY1&hl=en

wisnij · December 21, 2009, 11:59:15 AM

It may be wise to follow the usual linguistic style: write literal text in the "official" script as laid out by Dr. Frommer, and reserve IPA notation between // or [] for showing pronunciation. That will probably minimize confusion in the long run. For instance, the vowel written "u" is phonetically /u/ and phonemically can vary between [ u ] and [ʊ] (assuming I'm reading the Americanist notation right; I'm more used to IPA). Or for contrasting stress: "tute" can be either /'tutɛ/ "person" or /tu'tɛ/ "female person". (Here the apostrophe indicates stress, as opposed to the glottal stop /ʔ/ as used in running text.)

matthewmartin · December 21, 2009, 01:24:03 PM

Quote from: Eywayä 'eveng oe lu on December 21, 2009, 03:44:26 AM
Edit: I have just a question about the writing of the Na'vi language. We often see some things like that...for example when you wanna say a long river you can it like that "ngim-a kilvan". But my question is the following, do we have to write like that or this is just to see the grammatical part being stressed? Is "ngima kilvan" the way it has to be written then?

Dr Frommer has deprecated using - to signal a suffix/prefix split in the LL comments. I still like the convention of - for suffix/prefix and < > for infix because it helps people like me who are still "Like a child"

HawkPidgeon · December 21, 2009, 04:55:05 PM

I would find it useful to use the hyphens and such in the beginners' forum, but in intermediate and advanced I think we could simply go with what Frommer said: drop the hyphens; "ngima kilvan" or "kilvan angim" should be fine. (I may have misinterpreted what he said.)

Nume fpi sänume · December 22, 2009, 11:50:41 AM

I agree with hawk here, keeping it a bit more detailed in the beginners area would be great

Txep · December 23, 2009, 11:32:32 AM

All seems good for actual textbook sorts of things, but I think it would be easier without the accented characters here on the forum. I think there are only two: ì and the umlauted a ( IPA /æ/). Wouldn't it be easier to use something like i\ and a: for those two, here on the forum?

Seze · December 23, 2009, 01:52:45 PM

Quote from: Aidan on December 23, 2009, 11:32:32 AM
All seems good for actual textbook sorts of things, but I think it would be easier without the accented characters here on the forum. I think there are only two: ì and the umlauted a ( IPA /æ/). Wouldn't it be easier to use something like i\ and a: for those two, here on the forum?

I would prefer to see ì and ä. The keyboard short cuts may seem annoying at first, but I think its worthwhile to do

roger · January 11, 2010, 06:27:32 AM

There are various ways to input ì and ä on a Windows OS. What I use is an extension called "ABC Tajpu", which was designed principally for Esperanto but has multilingual support. It works with Firefox and I think also IE. With that installed, you type i` or a: and then hit the 'insert' key to convert to ì and ä, as I did just now. I'm sure there are other methods.

As for the 'standard script', what Frommer calls the standard script spells "you" ga and "this" ca'u. That is, except for the ejectives, there is one letter for each sound. The nga, tsa'u spelling is what he used in the film script to make things more accessible for the actors, who were not really learning the language. A question for us would be, do we want to stick to something as close as possible to English? or do we want to approach Frommer's vision for the language? Perhaps we could use ng and ts along with hyphens and brackets at the beginner level, and then graduate to g and c without hyphens at the intermediate level?