Nother/Sirius

Description

A sort of interlang intended for furries.

• Homepage: Siriuslang — Yahoo! Group

• Author: Muke Tever | ✎

Subpages

• Sirius Lexicon

Pronunciation and Spelling

• The accent goes on the first syllable of the word.

Vowels

There are five vowels: a e i o u These may be pronounced as in Spanish or Italian, with the exception that a is a schwa (IPA: /ə/), as in the English word cut.

E and o may also be pronounced as /æ/ and /ɑ/ respectively (the vowels of American English "cat" and "paw").

Consonants

f h j k l m n ng p r s sh t th tz w y z

These are all pronounced with their English values, with two exceptions:

• j is /ʒ/ as in “Asia”, (the same as in French)
• tz is pronounced like “ts”, (the same as in German).

Sometimes consonants are written double: ff, ck, ll, rr, tt etc. This is generally just a reminder of the pronunciation; the letters are not pronounced double.

Grammar

Question words

The most important thing to be able to do is ask questions.

The basic question words are —

her?	who?
het?	what?
hoj?	where?
ho?	when?
he?	why?
hiyu?	how?
hashar?	how much?

Example:

• Het atsha? What's that?

(You can use esti "to be" here, thus Het esti atsha? — but it isn't necessary to.)

Articles

Sirius does not use words for an or the. This may be confusing at first; it may be easier to think of it as sounding like newspaper headlines (Man dies in fire).

Pronouns

Like Japanese, Sirius does not require pronouns in most places, especially when context is enough. Instead you can use a name, species, title, or whatever.

Like English, Sirius pronouns have different forms for subject and object, but unlike English they are not marked for number; thus there is no difference between "I" and "we"; hi is used for either.

However, a distinction is made between in-character (IC) and out-of-character (OOC) pronouns. There are also possessive forms.

	I/we	mine/ours	you	yours
IC	heu	herru	tzomu	tzorru
OOC	hi	hear	tzom	tzor

Lexicon

Basic words

• see Sirius Lexicon

Technical words

Sirius gets technical terms from Greek and Latin, just like English does.

Examples:

• "illuminate": Latin illuminare → Sirius illumin
• "universe": Latin universum → Sirius uniwers
• "dinosaur": Greek δεινοσαυρος (deinosauros) → Sirius dinsor (or tinsor)
• "metamorphose": Greek μεταμορφόω (metamorphoō) → Sirius metamorf

Basic rules for deriving technical terms:

1. drop off any grammatical endings at the end of the word, like the -us, -um, -a at the end of Latin nouns, or the -o- in Greek compounds
2. there are several sounds that are not in Sirius, so the spelling should be changed:
   • Latin c to k, and v to w.
   • Greek z, ph, th, kh to tz, f, th, h/k (h before a vowel, k elsewhere).
   • Greek ai, oi and Latin ae, oe to e.
   • Greek and Latin au to o.
   • Greek ei to i and ou to u.