Minyeva: a systematic constructed language

• What is Minyeva?

Minyeva is a systematic conlang (constructed language). My goal is for Minyeva to reflect the underlying semantics of sentences (the meaning of what's being said) with more regularity than natural languages do in general. This means that words will not have multiple meanings, and there won't be synonyms. I will systematically create the dictionary of the language so that there are no unexplained holes. 

• What is Minyeva based on?

Some of Minyeva's design is based on the philosophies of Rick Morneau's monograph, Designing an Artificial Language: Lexical Semantics. Other ideas are taken from logical languages like Lojban. Bits and pieces are inspired from other conlangs and even natlangs (natural languages). A good chunk of it is just inspiration.

• What are the stats on Minyeva?

Minyeva doesn't use a standard subject/object/verb pattern: it uses a unique pattern of agent - action - patient - end state. Compared to english, this fundamental difference can yield more efficient expressions in some cases but longer ones in others. The language makes heavy use of modifiers and cases. 

• What is the history of Minyeva?

I started designing Minyeva on paper in late 1997, when it was called "Malat", and dropped it for a year. In october 1998 I picked it up again and started doing more work on it. I created this page in november 1998. Since then, I have been doing more design on the language about once or twice a year for about a month each time. In April 2002, I renamed it from "Malat" to "Minyeva".

• Sections of this site:

Word Reference:
root words, minyeva to english - 12/8/06 [1234 entries]
    root words, english to minyeva - 12/8/06

suffixes/particles - 10/28/06 [278 entries]
    suffixes/particles organized - 10/28/06

compound word dictionary - not started

Grammar Reference:
phonology/phonotactics - 5/13/02
morphology - not started
grammar: syntax - 11/11/06

Texts:
Babel Text - 5/10/02

Other:
News Archives - 1/17/04
Old Description of Minyeva

General Conlang Stuff:
Links to logical languages - 1/19/04
Weekly Vocabs - 1/31/04
Word Sets - 2/1/04

December 8, 2006:

I updated my vocabulary pages with 136 new words, plus made other changes. The biggest change is removing the distinction between state verbs and action verbs (I had already made this change in the grammar). Now all "a.p" and "s.f" words are "s.o". I also changed the way my words are stored; instead of updating a word document and converting that to html, I now store all my words in xml, and use XSLT to transform that into html for the webpage, and into pdf to print out for my own uses. Links: minyeva to english and english to minyeva. 

November 11, 2006:

I added more to the grammar page for minyeva. I have added details on tenses, argument modification, participles, reflexives, pro-verbs, converting between word classes, and miscellaneous affixes.

November 4, 2006:

I decided to remove the distinction between action and state verbs. Now all verbs come at the beginning of the sentence. I am still keeping the patient and focus object types; now, either one can be used with any verb. I updated the grammar page with this change. 

October 28, 2006:

I updated the suffixes/particles, both the alphabetical and organized list. There are now 278 entries. 

October 21, 2006:

Today I added more to the grammar page for minyeva. I added new stuff on noun types, plurality & number, gender, conversion from verbs to nouns, and numbers. 

October 14, 2006:

I have started expanding the grammar page for minyeva, and it is now titled Reference Grammar. I have dated the sections that are new from the previous version of the grammar page. I added new stuff on articles, verbs, and some affixes. 

February 6, 2005:

I have written up a very small text on the basic grammar of Minyeva. It should give you an idea of how the language is supposed to work.

February 5, 2005:

I have updated all of the word reference pages. I now have 1098 lexical words plus 262 functional words for a total of 1360 words. Soon I will put up a page on some very basic grammar of Minyeva.

February 1, 2004:

I started a section called Word Sets that has sets of word meanings. As of now, it only has the sets of meanings for the definite/indefinite articles of English and the English word "for". It should be of use to anyone trying to make up the functional words in their conlangs without having any tie-down to English usage.

January 31, 2004:

I collected all of the Weekly Vocab lists from the conlang archives and put them up my my page. There are 52 vocabs in all. So, if you're having trouble coming up with vocabulary in your own conlang or you need some easy sentences to translate, check it out.

January 17, 2004:

I worked on Minyeva during May of last year but I didn't put the new words up on the web page. I've now put up the root word pages for minyeva to english and english to minyeva, and the suffixes/particles word list alphabetized and organized. The word count is now 589 + 211 = 800. 

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