Miresua project of the month :: color revisions

This month I'll be posting revisions of some of my words for colors. These were among the first words I created in Miresua. In the past, I've usually deleted and re-added postings when I've changed words. But colors are important terms to me, and these changes involve bending my rules.

Finnish has four lengthy words for colors, with 7 to 9 letters, which end in the suffix "-nen". Finnish uses this suffix as a way to form adjectives. For my new revised words, I'm going to ignore the "–nen" suffixes on my Finnish source words. This will allow me to shorten my Miresua words.

There will be no words for the colors orange and pink in Miresua. Finnish and Basque have only in the past century acquired all the terms for the basic eight colors -- white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and gray -- and several words were derived from other languages. Finnish is establishing the borrowed word "violetti" for purple. The words for orange and pink are very recent, very obvious, loan words in both Finnish and Basque.

Miresua project of the month :: to be (part 2)

Miresua has two verbs "to be", like Basque, one which means "to exist" and the other means "to stay". Usage will be as with the Spanish verbs "ser" and "estar". Finnish (like English) has one verb "to be".

This month I'll be mixing conjugations of the Basque verb "egon" (to stay) with conjugations of the Finnish verb "olla".

Miresua project of the month :: to be

This month I'm going to create some words for the common verb "to be" in Miresua for the present tense.

Finnish (like English) has one verb "to be", but Basque has two verbs -- one which means "to exist" and the other means "to stay", like the Spanish verbs "ser" and "estar". Earlier I thought I'd use one verb "to be" in Miresua to simplify things. Upon further thought, there will be two verbs.

This month I'll be mixing conjugations of the Basque verb "izan" (to exist) with conjugations of the Finnish verb "olla". The Basque and Finnish languages handle verbs quite differently. Be warned, things are going to get messy.

Miresua pronouns revision

After some thought, I've decided to slightly change the rules for the 3rd person singular pronouns. Miresua will no longer use these two pronouns exactly as in Finnish. I'm going to expand the usage of the he/she pronoun to include animals, not just the people. The word it will be applied only to inanimate things and concepts. If it moves on its own and has eyes, the Miresua pronoun for it is he/she.

rules for Miresua :: a new letter

For Miresua, I pick a mixture of the letters from the Basque and Finnish words. But how should these letters be pronounced? Good question. As to be expected, Basque and Finnish pronounce things differently.

After some consideration, I've decided to add a new letter to the Miresua conlang. This will be an exception to my alphabetic mixture word construction.

I'm adding the letter ü -- that is u with an umlaut or two dots over it. It’ll be pronounced like u in the French word tu or the German letter ü. This is a reasonable addition. Miresua already uses two letters with umlauts -- ä and ö -- courtesy of its Finnish derivation. The ü sound is already present in Finnish; it's the letter y in Finnish. Estonian, which is a language closely related to Finnish, uses ü, instead of y, for this vowel. There is also a Basque dialect that makes use of an occasional ü.

Tentatively, my new rule is this: if the Finnish source word contains two "y"s, they can be replaced by a ü. I'll be modifying several existing Miresua words to take advantage of this change.