Tellic (
Ilven Taelur,
Ilven or simply
Taelur)
is the best known language of the Telluric language family. Tellic is a VSO
language (though with a relatively free constituent order) displaying a combination
of inflectional and agglutinative morphology. It is an ergative language -
not in the traditional sense, where it is the subjects of transitive verbs
that are marked for ergative case - but rather in the sense that it is the
subjects of volitional verbs - those verbs where the subject has the control
over the action - that are marked for ergative. As an example of this, consider
the sentence
paela kaunas tem (
the woman looks at the
house), where the volitional verb
paelat (
to look
at) requires a subject
kaunas marked for ergative and
a direct object
tem marked for nominative versus the sentence
paeli kauna temsi (
the woman sees the house) where
the non-volitional verb
paelit (
to see) takes a
subject
kauna marked for nominative and a direct object
temsi
marked for ablative. For further details on this, please refer to the
syntax
section. Most Tellic nouns and verbs are derived from CVC roots through
different inflectional and derivational morphological mechanisms. Most adjectives
are in fact expressed as non-volitional verbs. In this web site
you can find information on the following issues regarding the Tellic language:
It is universally accepted that painting, dancing, singing,
playing music, playing theatre, writing novels, essays and poetry, cooking and knitting,
among other human activities, are forms of
art.
By
art I understand any human activity - and its
results - that, while not necessarily having any evident practical utility,
causes pleasure in, at least, the maker and, hopefully, in a lesser or greater
part of other human beings as well. I would like to claim here that
creating languages is another form of
art,
a lesser form of it, maybe, but
art after all. In
fact, it seems to comply with the above definition of art: it is a human activity,
it is utterly useless and it certainly arises pleasure in myself. Whether
the results of it arise such positive feelings in other persons remains questionable,
but the fact that there are good known examples of language creations (e.g.
Tolkien's
constructed languages, Star Trek's
Klingon,
the fictional Romance language evolved from Latin called
Brithenig,
etc.), the huge number of constructed languages that
have
been published until now and a vast documentation on the issue (cf. Wikipedia's
entry on
Constructed
Languages, also caled
Conlangs) makes me thing that I'm not alone
in this claim.
