User:PearsonMoore1

From time to time I have stopped by to learn how to contribute to the wiki. I haven't made much progress yet, but I was able to create and edit this page, which is more than I could do yesterday!

Tasfit is a highly-declined language with a grammatical structure similar to several Indo-European languages. The feature of the language that will make it of interest on this wiki is the fact that it lacks first person singular and second person singular verb forms. First person plural, three varieties of third person singular, and third person plural are the only conjugations. This reflects the Tasfit mindset which understands membership in the group as essential to full personal and social expression. First person references are limited to expressions such as "This man is a linguist." The words "this", "that", "here", "there" and various locatives indicate the proximity of speaker to audience, both physically and socially. A typical exchange might begin as follows:

Man X: "This man has two eyes but one tongue." [Symbolic indication of eagerness to see and hear the group coupled with inference of a message to be communicated.]

Group: "This man is our brother.  We listen with two ears." [Ritual recognition of the speaker as member of the group, acknowledgement of readiness to hear the message.]

Man X: "This man brings news from the Mar Eganfa."

The Group response above includes a second-person reference:  "This man is our brother." To make a first-person reference, a speaker indicates herself ("this woman", "this man"). To make a second-person reference, the speaker indicates a relationship to the group:  "This sister" refers to someone other than the speaker, and the "this" proximity marker indicates second person.

I created Tasfit for my novel, Deneb, which I hope to publish in March 2013. I have created a system that includes seven noun declensions (nom, acc, gen, loc, abl, voc, ins), verbs declined in nominative and vocative (as you might expect in a language lacking first-person and second-person markers), nine present-tense conjugations (five for standard Tasfit, four additional persons for a hierarchical culture, the Verdos), and adjectives and adverbs that remain undeclined--I didn't want the language to be completely inaccessible to non-linguists.

The rationale for expending this level of time and energy is two-fold. First, I am creating an unusually matricentric, horizontal culture, and I use language as a means of illustrating some of the extreme differences between Western culture and the Tasfit culture. Second, one of the mysteries of the novel concerns setting and time. I will use "original documents" (written in Tasfit) as additional clues for those interested in taking the time to decipher them. Marooned airplane passengers and sailors on a 19th century French frigate find themselves on a planet with no moon, yet all the constellations are the same, and the conditions are Earthlike. The novel is called Deneb because the 19th century mariners figure out that Polaris moves in the sky. The only fixed star is Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus.