User:Soap/samples

Background

The Play language was famous for its difficult morphology, and its succinctness. In many cases, Play phrases were much shorter than their translations, although in part, this was due to Play speakers being more wordy than others, and therefore translations from other languages into Play also grew.

Note that fusional glosses below are given as though they were segmented. For example, pupa "book" does not contain /pup/ "book" + /ba/ "handheld object", but /pb/ > /p/ is an automatic sound rule that applies when that cluster would otherwise appear. This applies to more complex morphology as well; neither /pupa/ nor /pup/ appears in puku, the locative form of the stem of the word for book, but it is glossed as though it were /pup/ plus a locative morpheme even so. Likewise, /puku/ does not appear in the compounded form pukūaveepaes; rather the long vowel appears due to another sandhi process. And so on throughout the rest of each word. As all Play morphology is fusional, it would be inconvenient to represent it in any other way.

Open questions

Which of my books did you read to me?

Play

Pukūaveepaes?

book-LOC-read-OBL-PASS-REFL-handheld-CQ

Proto-Dreamlandic

huppuŋuami ........ ya ppirialippi

book-1P.GEN ........ INSTR DUR-read-2P

Where do you live, little spy?

Play

Pītabis pisisaes?

spy-child-OBL-EXT live.in-EXT-field-CQ

The typical Play practice was to place terms of address at the head of the sentence, even if in disrespect.

What country (are we in)?

Play

Vatīs?

country-CQ

The choice of whether to use tes or tīs is up to the pleasure of the speaker, as they both mean essentially the same thing, and both were in use for thousands of years leading up to the maturation date of classical Play. They were originally formed from distinct roots and a static suffix, but over time, Play came to reanalyze tīs as an inflected form of tes, specifically the essive case.

Proto-Dreamlandic

nimpumpia ...

LOC-country ...