Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

Slâm w h`vîv! ("peace and love" in Tech v1.00, obviously ripped off from Arabic)

D: "Joseph Fatula" <fatula3@...>

| I'm working on a new conlang (after all, it's a new week), and it's unusual
| in having 48 consonants.  There are prenasalized stops, glottalized
| consonants, ejectives, and plenty of those are possible syllable nuclei.
| What I wanted was a language where I could encode a large amount of
| affixation into a single syllable.  The best way to do that (I was thinking)
| was to have plenty of consonants that could add on, with many consonant
| clusters being allowed.

48 consonants, that's more than most other conlangs I've seen! How many vowels
however? Is it like NW Caucasian which has many consonants and only two or three
vowels?

How does that rank among the world's natlangs? There are 14 in the UPSID survey
with 40 or more consonants:

!Xu~ 95 (48 clicks)
Lak 60
an unidentified variety of Arabic 56
Panjabi 49
(the above three have distinctive gemination)
Kabardian 48
Haida 46
Mazahua 45
Shilha 45
Irish 44
Igbo 43
Tlingit 43
Sui 42
Otomi 41
Hindi-Urdu 40

So you're tied with Kabardian....

Also, you got both glottalized and ejective consonants. Since ejectives are a
subset of glottalized stops/affricates, do you mean glottal tension (as in
Korean), creaky voice, laryngealization, <'y> in Hausa?

| It's starting to look a bit like Georgian, but that might not mean much.  If
| I were to describe what a Georgian word looks like, I'd probably just say
| it's a word with lots of consonants.  So then any highly consonantal
| language would look like Georgian to me.

Yeah, and the infamous Bella Coola comes to mind as well. Tamazight is similarly
"consonantal" but words tend to be short. My Tech has theoretical words like
<mtL`q`ac'`> and <rdZGuTxw> and a lot of one-consonant prepositions, like the
aforementioned <d> "from" (it's pronounced [d@] by itself so don't worry :P)

| There's something disturbing me when I look at the map of my con-world.  I'm
| only working on one portion of one continent, and I already have finished
| over 30 languages for it.  And there's a whole lot of empty space left, not
| to mention another 2500 years of history.

So you just recreated the Caucasus? ;)

| But that's probably a good thing.  I might live another 70 years or so, if I
| stay in good health, and it'd be nice to have something to do for all that
| while.  Then again, I might die tomorrow and leave behind all kinds of
| cryptic notes in unknown languages.

The main purpose of my conlanging is to confuse people, when they rummage
through my notes and computer files.

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