The Tazhu Corpus Project Project started: Dec. 17, 2004 Latest Update: Jan. 9, 2005 Latest News: Dec. 24, 2004. The McGuffey's Reader used for this project came from Project Gutenberg, and is the original 1836 eidtion. That edition is exceedingly rare and hard to find these days, while the newer revised 1879 edition is still readily available. The Gutenberg Project only has text for the first and fourth readers. To fill this gap I am presenting here the complete text of the 1879 revised editions of all the readers, for your conlanging pleasure. McGuffey Download Page. Dec. 23, 2004 PM. I used to keep some sort of "things to do" list for my conlang projects, but now the only item on my "to do" list is "translate the next sentence in the reader." If I keep doing that the rest of the design process takes care of itself. My past conlang projects have been like drawing a blueprint for an internal combustion engine. This project is more like getting grease under my fingernails and scraping my knuckles on a stubborn manifold bolt. It's so much more "real" than my other conlangs. It's not as "well designed", and it has a lot of makeshift parts pressed into service in odd ways, like most natlangs. And even the nice regular rules I set down at the start of this project are beginning to have more and more exceptions. And even as I start on section four of the first reader there's signs of change on the horizon. Some of the sentences from today are a bit odd with respect to the old grammar from three days ago, but they feel more "right" somehow, and will probably suplant the old rules before the middle ages roll around some time next week. Dec. 23, 2004. Yesterday was mostly about correcting the many errors that crept into the text as a result of many changes and evolutionary mutations that took place in the period from Ancient Kazhu (circa Dec. 17 to Dec. 19) to early Old Tazhu (circa Dec. 20 to Dec. 22). Also added a few clip art pictures to the pure Tazhu text page. These are not the original McGuffey's illustrations, but are just there to lend a bit of visual interest to the page.
Previous news entries
Pure Tazhu translation with no English notes
-------------------------------------------------------------------- OVERVIEW This is a project to discover/invent a conlang (constructed language), to be known as Tazhu, not by planning or design, but by discovering, one sentence at a time, how to say simple things in that language. The method is to take the series of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, popular beginning readers since the early 1800's, and translate one sentence at a time, in sequence, from the beginning of the first reader to the end of the sixth reader. This will provide a series of exercises of graduated complexity beginning with "I see a boy." and concluding with excerpts from such great writers as Elzibeth Barret Browning and Sir Walter Scott. In this way each linguististic problem is solved as it is encountered without getting bogged down too early in needless details. For example, the past tense is not invented until it is first needed, and plurals are only discovered when they appear in the original source text. The discovery of the vocabulary of the language procedes at a steady pace ending up with a solid and reasonably complete lexicon. Once the sixth reader is complete there should be nothing to prevent translating just about any English work into Tazhu. I am hypothesizing that one side effect of this technique will be that the creator of the language, in drilling with large volumes of simple sentences each day, will develop reasonable fluency in the language as it is discovered. Each sentence from the original text will be presented, followed on the next line by the translation into Tazhu. Following that will be any new words or explanations of new grammatical discoveries. This corpus will be the definitive document concerning Tazhu grammar and vocabulary. Any other reference documents will be taken from information and examples in this corpus. The newest corpus entries will be considered the most authoritative. Like any language, this language is likely to change and mutate as time goes on. The very early sentences may end up being incorrect or ungrammatical viewed from the perspective of the completed sixth reader. For that reason, the first few hundred sentences should probably not be taken too seriously as representative of the language in its "modern" form. Changes to both vocabulary and grammar are bound to occur as I develop a feel for the language, so judgements passed on the basis of the early portions of the corpus are likely to be premature. Pronunciation is completely unknown and will have to be discovered over time as Tazhu is spoken and it's sound asserts itself. The format of this document is: English sentence. Tazhu translation. Alternate translations if any. Notes concerning grammar and vocabulary. Dates in the corpus give the date that a particular block of sentences was translated. Since sentences are always translated in their proper sequence all sentences that lie between two dates were translated on the first date above that block. As this line is written, nothing whatsoever is known about the language Tazhu. It has no grammar and no vocabulary. What it will look like and sound like remains a mystery yet to be discovered. So without further ado, I set forth on this journey of discovery. There are two versions of the translation, one with all my grammar and vocabulary notes interspersed and one which is only the translation.
Pure Tazhu translation with no English notes
McGuffye's New Eclectic Reader Translation to Tazhi
Working document with grammar and vocabulary notes interspersed.