Introduction to Seuna

About Seuna

In its final form Seuna is seems to be quite a natural language. By that I mean that most of the grammar and the "patterns" in the language would not be considered out of place in any natural language.

However Seuna, during its construction went though some stages that might not be considered so natural. At one stage the case of the nominative case was split into two cases depending upon whether the action was volitional or accidental, and the accusative case was split in two depending on whether the object was affected by the action or not. This sort of thing is not unknown in natural languages (in fact Dixon has written a book??? which covers this sort of thing)but I found that in Seuna that as different aspects of grammar affected each other, that Seuna took on the form of a bog standard nominative/accusative language. This is just one example of a process that was continually happening during the construction of Seuna.

The shaping of Seuna can be compared to the shaping of a protein. This is basically a long chain molecule that takes on a very definite and complicated shape. The final shape is determined by a series of folding events that are initiated by the attractive and repulsive forces that the various links in the chain have for each other. In a similar way the final shape of Seuna was determined by the way that different grammatical patterns and phonological patterns either clashed with each other, or matched with each other through a number of successive revisions. Taking this analogy further : as I couldn't have any thought that is impossible (or too difficult to express) - the protein that I created was constrained never to have to much unfilled space within its physical limits while it was developing.

It was an appreciation of the elegance of patterns within natural languages and the fascinating ways in which languages change shape through time that led to me constucting Seuna. And I suppose that the forces that shaped Seuna also shape natural languages.

Index

1. Introduction to Seuna
2. Seuna : Chapter 1
3. Seuna word shape
4. The script of Seuna
5. Seuna sentence structure
6. Seuna pronouns
7. Seuna nouns
8. Seuna verbs (1)
9. Seuna adjectives
10. Seuna demonstratives
11. Seuna verbs (2)
12. Asking a question in Seuna
13. Seuna relative clauses
14. Seuna verbs (3)
15. Methods for deriving words in Seuna
16. List of all Seuna derivational affixes
17. Numbers in Seuna
18. Naming people in Seuna
19. The Seuna calendar
20. Seuna units