Re: Pablo is back, Job, Argentina, Relay, Lord of the Rings

En réponse à Kala Tunu <kalatunu@...>:

> ak tu = i eat
> tu a nli = the animal eats
> tu ak a nli = i eat the animal
> tu nli = the animal is eaten
> tu a nli a ak = i feed the animal
Wow! It took me a great while to parse this example! (and I'm still not quite
sure of whether my parsing is correct) I'd say: ak: I, tu: eat, nli: animal,
VSO word order (but becomes SV, at least with ak, when there's no object). I'm
not sure how to analyse 'a' though. Does it belong to the verb or to the
following noun? Or is 'a' polysemic? How would you say, "the animal is eaten by
me"? "tu nli a ak"?
Interesting isolating conlang... Children of 9 can sometimes be very
surprising :)) .

>
> oh, and here is a question i always wanted to ask but never did because
> it's so
> cliché: did anyone make up a conlang word and realize it was the same in
> another
> natlang s/he never heard of before? i remember stuff like "nepi" for
> baby and
> the day after (really the day after and no later, i swear it) i had this
> class
> where we read the homer greek nepios "young child". this cast some doubt
> in my
> head about claimed "intercivilization" loanwords that were so
> fashionable then.
> two years ago i made my conlang vocabulary with excel: i listed the
> 1400-or-so
> root concepts i had painstakingly gathered through years on one column.
> then i
> selected the 8 archconsonants and 5 vowels i had heard in most languages
> i knew
> of and made 1400-or-so CVCV words out of them and listed them on another
> column.
> then i shuffled the CVCV column with the "random" excel application and
> guess
> what? i "discovered" plenty of "cognates" with natlangs! "tebe/tepe"
> came out as
> mountain" (nahuatl "tepetl", turkish "tepi", english "top", etc.),
> "minu" was
> "eye" (japanese "me/miru/manako", "taka" was "man" (pascuan "tangata"),
> "bami"
> was "brother", "bume/pume" was "smoke", "bimi" was "two", etc. since
> that day
> i've read Meritt Ruhlen's book "The Origin of Language" with another
> pair of
> eyes :-))))
>
:)))))) It has also a nice connection to my question in my mail "Mayan and
Japanese" :))) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.