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--- On Tue, 3/30/10, James Campbell (zolid.com) <kraamlep@hidden.email> wrote: >Padraic eskrë » >> >Kerno: ? >> >> Is Jameld part of IB? Both the names "Alsace" and "Saar" seem >> to be current in IB, and would probably be rendered as l' >> Alsas and il Sarrow respectively. >> >> If they were speaking of a different reality, probably Ter y >> nZrourres. > >No, Jameld/Zuraaland are not part of IB, they're in their own alternative >reality where everything else is the same as *here*. I'd thought so, but wasn't perfectly certain. >What's the etymology of >the gloriously exotic-looking "Ter y nZourres" (apart, of course, from >the first word, which is obvious :-) (Sorry for the wrong spelling!) Terra illorum Sarorum -> the genitive causes nasal mutation, hence the odd "n". The -orum gets replaced with a more conventional and levelled plural ending -es. Eventually, the mutation itself gets dropped from the spoken language (though not from the spelling), so you end up with something that sounds like "terry zore". Nasal mutation has the effect of voicing a voiceless consonant: le ngatte me ouezem /l@ gat mi wED@m/ = the cat I see where the nominative of cat is il cats /Il kat/. An unusual word order inversion there. Usually, you'd encounter it VSO rather than OSV. I suspect this reflects some kind of topic emphasis that the usual word order doesn't quite convey. Note also the accusative-nominative pronoun. Kind of like how we'd say "Me, I see the cat." What's interesting is that the people themselves do have a genitive plural form: lor Saror that seems to have evaded the nasal mutation that otherwise would have affected it. This form is only very rarely met with in the modern language. You do see it in the popular expression "si, ag ma meyzor at la rigu francor" /si ag m@ mIDEjr at la rIgu frankor/. That's what you tell someone when you don't believe a word of what they've just told you. I'm uncertain why there are two such genitive forms that behave so differently. >James Padraic