Re: Fadawana si Buruda

Alex Fink wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:25:17 -0700, Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...> wrote:
>
>> Foolish mortal!  You dare inquire about the arcane lore of the
>> Conlanging Secrets (TM)???  Okay, I'll tell you.
>>
>> In this language, you need to know three things to define a consonant:
>> its place of articulation, its method, and its voice.
>> - There are three places of articulation: labial, dental, and velar.
>> - There are three methods, roughly: stop, nasal/approximant, and fricative.
>> - There are three "voices": voiceless, voiced, and prevoiced clusters.
>>
>> As every syllable is phonemically CV, you don't have to worry about
>> clusters.  There are only three vowels: a, i, and u.  This means that
>> every syllable is defined by four variables: place, method, voice, and
>> vowel.
>>
> [...]
>
> Are you, perchance, a Set player?
>
Until just now, I'd never heard of it.  Now that I've read an article on
it, it does look interesting...

> I once made a layout for a linguistic Set deck, with the constraint that the
> other player was an English monoglot so I couldn't include anything outside
> our lect of English.  Going with CV syllables this meant 9 Cs [p t k   b d g
>   m n N], and 9 Vs [& 6 A   e(I) @ o(U)   i I u], making the four features
> place, method+voice, height, backness.  The [I] wasn't entirely
> satisfactory, but I pretended it was [1] or at least [I\].
>
> Anyway, this makes me wish I'd looked closer at your systems of alternations
> when you posted them as puzzles.  I got as far as noticing that you had an
> involution on the consonants, but gave up at that point, partly, I'm ashamed
> to admit, 'cause the nonnaturalism of the scheme looked unrewarding.  A
> nicely done system.
>
Some of the changes you can apply to a word are in fact involutions,
though many are not.  (An involution, for those who don't know, is a
process you can apply once, then apply again to get right back where you
started, like 1-x.)

For example:
   yantu + [patient] = zantu
   zantu + [patient] = yantu  (Though there wouldn't be a pair of
independent words "yantu" and "zantu" for exactly this reason.)

But:
   yantu + [partitive] = nulzi
   nulzi + [partitive] = artizhi

>
>> The whole point of this was to come up with another method of alteration
>> than the ones usually used; affixes, infixes, umlaut, etc., as this is
>> intended to be a non-human language.  Does this system do that, or does
>> ANADIEW?
>>
>
> Let's just say I would be violently floored if ANADEW.  I don't think I've
> heard of any theory of phonology that could cope with things like the value
> of one parameter just copying wholesale the value of a totally unrelated one.
>
> Alex
>
That's what I thought, but you never know for sure...

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