Halana Hafasa

From UniLang Wiki

Halana Hafasa (conlang created by elgrande for UniLang competition)

"Halana Hafasa" means "easy language".

Rules

1.) Spelling is phonemic and phonetic. Except for r, each letter represents the sound it would have in IPA, so "a" represents [a], "b" represents [b], etc. The following letters exist: a, b, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r (a flap sound), s, t, u, v, z, ! (click sound, most often alveolar) Stress is free and can be placed on any syllable, especially when disambiguating similar-sounding words. In normal speech, however, the first syllable is usually stressed, because it is most likely to create misunderstandings.

2.) Each word has the following phonemic structure: CV(CVCVCVCV etc.)

3.) A word stem is never used on its own. There is always at least a meaning consonant and a function vowel before it, as in "halana" = language, where "h" is the meaning consonant (refers to abstract things), "a" is the function vowel and the stem "lana" (which means something related to "tongue").

4.) Meaning consonants:

- b for plants
- d for animals
- f for human beings (except for Germans)
- g for bots and Germans (or for something related)
- h for abstract things
- j for anything else that is alive and does belong to the categories mentioned before
- k for tools (including computers, but not bots)
- l for places
- m for body parts
- n for materials
- p for hard objects like rocks, planets, grains of sand, etc.
- r for soft objects like wool, pullovers, etc.
- v for anything slibbery and slimy
- z when nothing else is appropriate
- ! when you have forgotten the right meaning consonants, for spontaneously formed words or for slang words

There is not much rhyme or reason as to what a meaning consonant will make out of a certain stem, but let's have a look at an example:

lana  (something with a tongue)
 

- balana (= banana fruit, a fruit roughly shaped like a tongue)
- dalana (sole; an animal somehow related with a tongue in the mind of those speakers)
- falana (speaker; a person who used his tongue in speech)
- galana (the German language)
- halana (language, something abstract related to a tongue)
- jalana (rare, but sometimes used for special forms of "halana" such as Klingon, which are not usually spoken by human beings, animals or plants)
- kalana (a special brush that some people use to clean their tongue)
- lalana (linguistics: tongue position)
- malana (tongue, yes, the body part that is related to the tongue is the tongue)
- nalana (not used)
- palana (not used)
e - ralana (not used)
- valana (saliva)
- zalana (French kiss)
- !alana ("this tongue thing", basically anything that is related to the tongue, when context is clear. Such words are usually avoided in formal writing, though.)

You see, it doesn't make much sense, but once you've learnt all the meaning consonants and you get to know a new stem, your chances are high 1.) you will easily remember a new word and 2.) you can guess what a new word mans.

Most verbs are formed by adding "ki" to a noun. Again there isn't much rhyme or reason as to what a particular verb will mean, but it is always closely related to the noun. The typical position vowel from the noun loses its importance in these cases and can be chosen freely, the -ki at the end shows that it's a verb for which position vowels are meaningless. Most often -a is chosen, though. However, other first syllables can and must be added from the subject or object of the verb as always (see below).

balanaki - to peel a banana
dalanaki - to try to catch a dalana
falanaki - to say, speak (but not only for humans)
galanaki - to speak German
halanaki - to know how to speak a language (in practise often interchangeable with falanaki)
jalanaki - to speak a non-human, non-animal and non-plant language like Klingon (but also for humans who speak this language etc.)
kalanaki - to clean one's tongue (redundant object = tongue)
lalanaki - to get one's tongue in a certain tongue position (object = the new tongue position)
malanaki - to lick
valanaki - to spit (object = direction)
zalanaki - to give s.o. a French kiss

For more click here!

4.) Function vowels
A typical syntactical unit in Halana Hafasa consists of three elements:
- The first element : fame (human) for example
- The second element: karera (car) for example
- The third elements that shows the relation between these two things: fakavida (sees) (vida being the stem "to see")

The third elements copies the first syllable of the subject and of the object, the subject-syllable coming first.

This means completely free word order without ambiguities!!! :)
All "fame karera fakavida", "karara fame fakavida", "fakavida karera fame" etc. mean "The human sees the car."

But you already see the problem: What if two words have the same first syllable? This would lead to severe misunderstandings. That's why function vowels exist. Note that u is NOT a function vowel. The first vowel in a word (the one after the meaning consonant) is not fixed, but can be chosen by you.
Let's take "The German sees the VW".
German = game, gime, geme, gome | we simply choose one, let's take "game"
VW = garera, girera, gerera, gorera | we can choose again, but we mustn't use garera, because we already have ga, so let's take girera

>>> Game girera gagivida. = The German sees the VW.

Other possibilities to express the same:
Gime gorera gigovida. = Gogevida gome gerera. etc.

The function vowels allows you neatly to use 4 words with the same meaning consonant in one sentence, but what if you still need more? Then you can put !u before the first syllable, this way you can deal with 8 words of the same class, if even more distincitions are necessary more !u can be added. Note that all !u must also appear in the third (=connecting) element.

• Note: Game garera gagavida would mean that the German person sees himself and is a VW at the same time.
  
  

5.) One sentence often consists of several syntactical units that are connected with each.
The man has a VW. = Fame fagapo garera.
The man's VW hits the tree. = Fame fagapo garera gababuma babolo. (Man have car hit tree. car being the object of the first part and the subject of the next part.)
The man's VW hits the tree which hits the German. = Fame fagapo garera garabuma barabolo bagobuma gome. (Man have car hit tree hit German.) (Note that ga was not used for two words!) NOTE that word order is still completely free and it is not clear what would be a main clause or a subordiante clause in English.

6.) Once you've understood this, you have pretty much understood all of Halana Hafasa's grammar, just a few grammatical words and you are through. Such words always consist of C+u. With these words word order DOES matter.

- "bu" is a question particle meaning "which/what". It always follows the word it belongs to "fame bu" (what man = who), "game bu" (what German), "hatime bu" (what time = when). In contrat to English "what" it is never used on its own.
When "bu" occurs at the beginning of a sentence, the sentence is a yes/no question.
- "du" = or (note that "if" is expressed as "or not")
- "fu" = beginning of subordinate clause or something similar (a second sub clause must start with fufu, no matter how subordinate it is. A third with fufufu etc.)
- "gu" = ending of subordinate clause (for closing fufu use gugu etc.)
- "hu" = added to the connecting element as the subject or object syllable when the subject/object is the sub clause between fu and gu (huhu for the one between fufu and gugu etc.)
- "ju" = and (at the same time)
- "ku" = for orders
- "lu" = can be put in front of a connecting word of a sentence to refer back to it in a new connecting verb.
- "mu" refers is used as the object/subject syllable of another connecting word to refer back to the connecting word with "lu".
- "nu" is a word to be polite, it has a wide range of meanings
- "pu" = not (follows the negated word)
- "ru" makes the opposite of the proceeding word
- "su" shows that the word mentioned before can't really be applied, but neither can the opposite, it's somewhere in the middle (biga = big, biga ru = small, biga su = normal in size)
- "tu" is a word that is mainly used in dialogues. When you start what you say with "tu", it means that all first syllables in this sentence will have the same meaning as in the last sentence the other person has said.
- "vu": When a word has the grammatical syllables "huhu" and "hu", it logically starts with "huhuhu". But a word with the syllables "hu" and "huhu" would look the same. Therefore, it is defined that in "huhu(huhuhuhu...)hu" only the last "hu" is the object. If this is not what you mean, you can separate the subject and object syllables by using "vu", for example "huvuhuhu", where "huhu" is the object. In "hu(huhu...)vuhu" the "vu" is, of course, redundant, but it's not wrong.

....(to be continued)

- !u is a help when too many words of the same class are in one sentence (see above).

7.) How many parts of speech does the language have?
Three: normal words (for the first and second position), connecting words (for the third position), grammatical words

8.) One example please (The text of Sounds of the World):
Nu famiko,
nu fa-la-ta la-loko ha-la-po ha-pojeto !a-ha-po !a-Unilang ha-nova he-ha-po he-nomo he-fu-se fu "za-sono le-za-po le-mono" ha-ze-se ze-rekodo ze-biga pu (lu-fa-ze-hore mu-fu-se fu ha-time ha-nova gu) ha-hi-po hi-volo hi-fufu-ze fufu ha-za-sovi ho-za-po ho-lana le-ho-po za-fa-go fa-perene ho-fa-po. Hu-vera du hu-vera pu fu famiko fa-za-hore za-sono za-la-ta la-sisi za-ze-se ze-sono fa-ze-pere gu. Ku fa-miko fa-nevosa pu! Ha-sisi hehakoza he-hulana he-hi-po hi-lana hi-za-po za-mono. Ku ha-time pu mu-ha-ta lu-hu-bone pu fu fa-miko fa-fe-hore fe-lana fe-bone gu? !a-Unilang !a-hu-pera fu ha-pojeto ha-la-ta la-sisi ha-huhu-juda fufu famiko fa-pere gugu gu.
Nu!

(Hyphens indicate a new grammatical syllable, the first syllable of a normal word or the object/subject-syllables of a connecting word. They are not usually used in writing.)

9.) What advantages does Halana Hafasa have?
- Very free word order!
- Unambigious, logical grammar!
- Easy grammar with few rules!
- Grammar that is not close to natural languages!
- Vocab that is easy to remember!
- You could write the bible in one sentence with it and possibly save a lot of space, because no word is ever repeated. Of course, this language also trains your memory, because you always need to remember which word had gotten which first syllable. Beginners, however, can start a new sentence whenever they like, which allows you to forget about all the syllables already used in the text.
- No consonant clusters!


10.) What about the language's history?
Halana Hafasa used to be slightly inflecting. That was at a time, when connecting words could still be subdivided into two classes: verbs and verb-like particles. The latter can still be recognized today by the fact that they do not end in -ki and are usually relatively short. Verblike particles were never inflected. Real verbs, however, had to express time (NOT TENSE). The verb endings were:
- ka (for actions from midnight - 8 am)
- ki (for actions from 8 am - 4 pm)
- ke (for actions from 4pm - midnight)

So, the meaning of our word "falanaki" would have been restricted to actions happening between 8 am - 4 pm. All those rules were followed surprisingly strictly even in everyday speech. When actions took place in more than one time zone, the ending of the time was chosen in which the action took place longer. If you wanted to say "He worked." and he actually worked from 7 am to 10 am, you would have chosen -ki, because the action took place in the -ki time zone longer (2 hours in comparison to 1). If he worked equally long in both time zones, you would have chosen -ka, because in such cases the ending for the time zone in which the action started was preferred. When no such thing was logical (as in "fire is hot"), people usually chose the ending that was of relevance in their specific situation.

Anecdotes of confusions are not unheard of, though. A famous historian mentions night watches using -ke even at midday out of habit, because due to their profession they hardly ever used -ki usually.

The use of -ki became more and more universal with the invention of electric light: Day time didn't matter so much anymore and pretty soon -ki was used in sloppy speech to mean any time or occasion where there was light. This extended so far that at some part -ka and -ke fell out of usage.

Today most speakers of Halana Hafasa don't understand those old endings anymore. Some fixed expressions from those times are still known, but they sound extremely formal. Ironically it is an exception that is still best-known: The greetings "nuka" (good morning), "nuki" (good day) and "nuke" (good evening, good night) were once introduced as neologisms by an author. They were created from the grammatical word nu and the verbal endings and must have sounded funny at first. But as people wanted to show off with their interest and knowledge of literature, those greetings soon became wide-spread.
(We must not forget that today's word "nuki" has a different meaning: to greet, to thank etc. The old meaning of "nuki" is still understood, but it's way too formal, people always simply say "nu".)

The origin of the endings -ka, -ki and -ke is still dubious. They may have come from the old word "kaha" which emphasized the preceding word and other old words "*ala" (morning), "*iju" (sun) and "jo!a" (to eat).

11.) How come Halana Hafasa has this simple phonemic structure?
It is unknown why Halana Hafasa lacks consonant clusters. However, the development away from vowel clusters is well-known. Halana Hafasa used to have vowel clusters, which were often pronounced as diphthongs (but this was not phonemic), as in "laiaio". "h" was a consonant like any other, but at some point rural, uneducated people stopped using it - merging "ha!a" (apple pie) with "a!a"(whore). Dropping "h" was a signal of poor education and a number of words happened to have "dirty" meanings when pronounced without the "h" (as in the example above). Dropping one's h's was not good for one's career etc., so people started to use "h" everywhere as a hypercorrection, as this was somehow more acceptable, especially among those who didn't know where to put an h either. This meant the end for consonant clusters, so the old word "uhaua" [uhaŭa] has become our root word "huhahuha".

12.) Does Halana Hafasa have different accents?
Yes, but only the standard accent is accpeted everywhere. Other accents are usually considered as very uneducated. Typical of such uneducated speech are the following features:
- "r" is pronounced as a trill
- ! seems to merge with t, as it is an alveolar stop
- but in those accents actual "t" is dental
- final "i" is not pronounced
- there is a separate phoneme (sometimes spelt "pf" when writing those dialects) : an unvoiced bilibial fricative. This phoneme has merged with f in standard accents.