Smarkaka salwa! Cha swaki mansim nakway na hu-kraybam, num palhu Winja-kashyan war-warharsh, "U mash krayba!" Tu kraybam. Nawa watasim mash krayba walpim. Dwis, um graybman Twitter-ha santaya, ham ya walhatan wayda.
Hello everyone! For six months I haven't written anything here, and many Wenja fans keep saying to me: "Write more!" And so, I am writing. In the new year I hope to write more as well. Again, send me a message via Twitter so I know what you'll want (me to write about).
Last night I was having dinner with my wife, Brenna, and our son, and we started counting in other languages. We did German (Bren's fluent in it), then Italian (I used to be), then Spanish, and Russian, and then Wenja. And I realized: we never did a post on how to count in Wenja on the blog. Let's begin with 1-10.
- One: sam
- Two: dwa
- Three: tray
- Four: kwatur
- Five: panku
- Six: swachi
- Seven: sapitam
- Eight: hashtah
- Nine: nawan
- Ten: dacham
For 11-19 you say "10 & X"
- Eleven: dacham samkwa
- Twelve: dacham dwakwa
- Thirteen: dacham traykwa, etc.
Higher numbers go like this:
- Twenty: dwidacha
- Thirty: tridacha
- Forty: kwaturdacha
- Fifty: pankudacha
- Sixty: swashdacha
- Seventy: sapitamdacha
- Eighty: hashtashdacha
- Ninety: nawandacha
- Hundred: dichanta
To make 21, 45, 102, etc., you modify these numbers in the same way as 11-19.
- Twenty-one: dwidacha samkwa
- Forty-five: kwaturdacha pankukwa
- One hundred and two: dichanta dwakwa.
That's it! For those of you who know a bit about PIE, you'll recognize that these numbers pretty much come directly from there, with slight modifications in pronunciations and morphology.
Now let's see these numbers used in some sort of context, for which we'll introduce three other useful Wenja words: kwacha "how many" (interrogative), yacha "how many" (relative), tacha "so many". Note that I have made up the dialogue below.
- Takkar: Jayma, kwacha hisu tiyi? "Jayma, how many arrows do you have?"
- Jayma: Miyi panku (hisu). "I have five (arrows)"
The use of yacha ... tacha is strange for a modern speaker of English. As we'll discuss in a future post, relative clauses were done in a backwards fashion to what we expect today.
- Rushani: Aysh yacha tachisla Izilay, tu-ra Takkar tacha say prati bawga. "However many weapons the Izila have, Takkar will use (them) against them."
You'll likely hear some of the lower numbers in the "barks" scattered across Oros.
Tu sakwan prasti!
