Re: Hi, I'm a new guy... not in the face!

        Hi,
        If I may throw in an idea, have you thought about using tone? This
is how many languages, such as Canton and Mandarin, compensate for a
dominance of one-syllable words.
        The tone markers could either be "inferred" like Semitic vowels
(only written when you wish to make the document as readable on as low a
level as possible, like religious or legal texts), or always present. The
problem with being always present is that they may become rather cumbersome
if you tone-mark three or four syllables.

        One fix for this is something I do in one of the elven languages in
my DnD campaign. In Nimbadaril, which is loosely based on Sanskrit, all the
vowels in the nominative singular of a noun or root of a verb are of the
same length and tone (short and flat), except one. The stressed syllable can
have one of several accent markers (usually acute-rising, grave-falling,
macron-long, ring-rounded). Declining the noun adds tone markers to the
grammatical inflection.

        Anyway, a system like this could work well for you. Perhaps only the
first or second syllable is tonal, or perhaps alternating syllables (perhaps
only 1&3, or 2&4, or perhaps different word classes use different patterns).
So, you can just add one tone marker to each word cluster, and know that it
only modifies the first tone, or modifies the second and third because it's
a verb (whereas a noun would be first), or the last, or some such.

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Christophe Grandsire
| Subject: Re: Hi, I'm a new guy... not in the face!
|
| En réponse à "Hiro M." <hiro_m_2k@...>:
| > I'm trying to design a language for a race of people
| > in a fantasy story I'm working on, and I've run into
| > some
 8< snip >8
| > In Hangul, the characters are put together to form
| > syllables; vowels
| > are vertical or horizontal lines so you know where
| > they go, and
| > consonants are basically whatever. In my language, I
| > can't arrange
| > them like that, because each character already
| > represents a syllable,
| > and they are put together in block format to create
| > words. So how
| > could I design a basic set of rules to determine what
| > can and what
| > can't go where in order to form orderly blocks?
|
| Well, the problem with this idea is that words can be of a
| awful lot of
| syllables, making the whole one-block-per-word idea a little
| difficult IMHO.
| Unless your language doesn't allow words of, say, four
| syllables, you're gonna
| run into trouble.
 8< snip >8
| blocks. For longer words though, you'll be obliged to cut
| them in two blocks or
| more. But longer words wouldn't be that frequent would they?
| Christophe.