Ring C: 11/11: gjâ-zym-byn

In the coldest month of the year, a boy went to a far-off place in the hope of fighting [against] the pain of winter. There he always waited for a cat, and with it went to school. This cat, which was big and red, ordinarily sat on [the boy's] shoulders. And thus the boy went cheerfully to school, all the time balancing the animal.

Ah! But this time it happened otherwise: the cat jumped about and started to attack him. It had seen that the coach was approaching, and when the animal had cast his gaze forward, it touched the wall of the garden, and he felt how cold that was; because this was unpleasant, it returned to the place from which he came, the boy's bag.

[Just then], when the coach arrived, the cat quickly situated his body comfortably. Ah! This was a dreadful day for the cat, and this was only just the beginning...

gjâ-zym-byn (gzb) is an agglutinative language, fairly minimalistic lexically, which leads to some long and sometimes not perfectly perspicuous compounds. In the lexicon I've listed mostly only the root words, particles and suffixes, but also listed a few compounds used in the text where they seemed especially hard to guess from the component morphemes. Feel free to email asking for help, or look at the online lexicon.

Root words are nominal, and are turned into verbs and modifiers -- also postpositions and conjunctions — with appropriate suffixes. Compound postpostions, used to mark case roles, typically use the generic "at, in, near, around" postposition {i} as a suffix on a root word for some appropriate abstract concept.

The only verb suffixes used in the text are {-zô} and {-van}. The former marks an active (agentive) verb, the latter a stative (but not necessarily non-agentive) verb.

The typical morpheme order in compounds is head-modifier, but some roots that should be heads act like suffixes; I think {cu} and {bly} are the only ones used in the text, and I've listed their compounds specifically anyway.

Typical word order is OVS, but varies since subjects and objects are marked fairly explicity for theta roles with postpositions. Postpositional phrases almost always precede what they modify. Most complements tend to precede the object and verb. gjâ-zym-byn allows for omitting the subject when it is the same as in the previous sentence.

Punctuation: all sentences end in a period. The asterisk * marks an excited or emphasized sentence (or standalone interjection). Tildes ~~~ are used as ellipsis. The apostrophe or single quote ' marks syllable boundaries in polysyllabic roots.