Starbound

Starbound

Felin
#1 Kiss Girl Nov 24, 2017 @ 2:56pm
Felinese
big warning: this is me being a huge ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nerd over things that don't matter and i'm probably wrong anyway. i'm deathly curious though.

okay, so!! i decided to learn just enough felinese to understand the various graffiti and signs and whatnot. however i'm starting to run into some strange problems, like characters and words that don't exist in the dictionary or are otherwise erroneous. i could be fundamentally misunderstanding certain aspects, but i'd also like to know if i am or not, so here are the things i've run into. tell me if i'm super duper wrong, i wouldn't be surprised.

for one, written 'i' is two vertical lines rather than the one vertical line displayed in the dictionary but i get the feeling that might be a font issue (shift+\ comes up as two different things, depending on your font, but only one of them is identical to the felin 'i'), not necessarily an actual error. still worth mentioning, because holy heck that was confusing.

for another, in the felin wisdom sign[i.gyazo.com], there seems to be a character that doesn't exist, used in a word that isn't listed in the dictionary. it looks like the character for 'L' but with a line through the dots. it comes out like this:

"tla etha mla(?)rl"
("to all ???")

the only other word that starts with 'mla' that i could find in the dictionary was 'mlagri', the word for like, but it doesn't end the same way as the word in the sign, and there are no -rl affixes as far as i'm aware.

the graffiti[i.gyazo.com] that is supposed to convey that "Femine is sweet and charming" is missing the 'e' at the end of 'Femine' (maybe this is intentional?), and the word for 'sweet' being used is the one that refers to literal taste rather than 'be sweet' (although knowing felin this could be intentional too, HEH). it also has an inexplicable lone 'i' at the end of 'sweet', is that an 'and' of some kind? finally, i'm having trouble understanding the last word, 'oene', but i think that might be a signature.

"femin dlaphem i biumhuaw oene"
("Femin(e) sweet <i> charming-like <oene>")

just to toss one more on the pile, the Chelsie-related graffiti[i.gyazo.com], besides the lampshaded error in Chelsie's name, conveys exactly what it's meant to (chelsie/'chelise' is cool), but i don't get 'oee'. is that a signature as well? do some felin have all-vowel names? is it initials? seems pretty similar to the example above.

i'm guessing a lot of this could probably be chalked up to "it's graffiti and people are sloppy" along with me not getting certain nuances, but the wisdom sign and the possible signatures are what i'm really hung up on here. any help i could get understanding this neat language better would be awesome.

sahl!
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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Kawa  [developer] Nov 25, 2017 @ 12:39am 
The sign reads "tla etha mlagriil". That is, "to all like-IMP". "mlagri" plus the imperative suffix "-il". It's a bit wonk and I've since added a word for being nice so I might change it to "ethafel tuile'il" in a later update. The mystery character is 'gr'.

"Femin dlaphem i biumhuaw oene". Femine is a romanization of Femin, indeed. The lone "i" is a colloqual shorthand for "emi" -- "dlaphem emi". Again, an early-installment mistake conjugates "oe" wrong. I already have a fixed version with only the "-n".

The Chelsie graffiti reads "Chelise is cool". "-e" is the second person present. This is an error that will be corrected to "oen".

It's graffiti and I was sloppy.

----

The wisdom sign has been retranslated and the second-person to be have been changed to third. Thank you.
Last edited by Kawa; Nov 25, 2017 @ 12:52am
#1 Kiss Girl Nov 25, 2017 @ 9:43am 
awesome to know. thanks for the help, and i'm very glad i could sort-of contribute!! i really like this mod a lot, and i love the conlang. keep up the good work! i'll keep a-learnin' as i go. :3
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