Re: A new, slightly bizaare, conlang

--- Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>
> Not very bizarre except for the creaky vowels.
Well, yes, vowels aren't too difficult here. When I
said extraordinary, I suppose I meant that it was
unusual for me....Silindion after all is rather
straight forward.

> > In the orthography, a doubled vowel is long, and a
> > creaky vowel is followed by a _~_
> >
> > After uvulars, /i/ becomes /@j/
>
> Makes sense; it is somewhat difficult to pronounce a
> front vowel
> after a uvular.  There is a strong tendency to
> either front the
> uvular, back the vowel or both.
This is what we figured...since we were having a hard
time saying /i/ after a uvular.

> >  Consonants:
> >   /p_>/  (bilabial unvoiced ejective)    _p_
> >   /b_</ (bilabial voiced implosive)      _b_
> >
> >   /d'/  (retroflex voiced plosive)       _d_
> >   /t'/  (retroflex unvoiced plosive)     _t_
> >
> >   /q_>/ (uvular unvoiced ejective)       _q_
> >   /g\_</ (uvular voiced implosive)       _g_
>
> Yeah!  That's wild.  But why aren't the retroflexes
> glottalized?
I suppose for extra randomness. My co-worker thought
up the phonology, he's a phonetics guru...so, I just
went along with it. We debated about having the
retroflexes act the same as the others, but decided
not too. However, in words where there are both other
types of stops and retroflexes, the retroflexes
probably become somewhat assimilated to the others.

> I must say that this rule is not bizarre at all;
> nasals tend to
> assimilate to the POA of the following consonant,
> and epenthetic
> vowels in order to break up same-consonant clusters
> aren't
> uncommon either.
Oh, no, I didn't think this was too bizarre. I suppose
though the main strangeness comes in the consonants
and perhaps some of the syntax.


> > The role particles so far are:
> >
> >  o'   commitative   with
> >  nga  benefactive   for, to (or untranslatable)
> >  mi   experiencer
> >  pe   source        from
>
> So these are, essentially, prepositions, it seems.
Yes, prepositions, but also theta role markers. The
"benefactive", "experiencer" and "source" especially.
They can all be untranslated. And a sentence may have
a subject or object preceded by any of the
markers....as long as the semantics works out. It's
sort of what I understand a fluid-s language to work
out as.


~~Thanks for your message, Jörg...but I wanted to know
what you meant when you said it was unlikely as a
natlang? Were you referring to the phonetics, or to
the sentence examples?

~Elliott



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

Reply