Re: natlang stuff: vowelless words
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, April 21, 1999, 6:40 |
|---|
At 08:45 20/04/99 PDT, you wrote:
>Since I've been studying this, I'll mention something that might
>interest you, and one or more of you might have this in a conlang...
>
>Russian (and other Slavic languages) have a few words made up of one
>consonant and no vowel. These are all prepositions:
>
>_v_ "in; at; to"
>_k_ "to; toward" (with dative)
>_s_ "with, accompanied by" (with instrumental); "from" (with genitive)
>
>And I think there's a _z^_ /Z/ used in literary registers; I believe
>it's an emphatic particle. It also appears as _z^e_.
>
>Again, these are considered independent words, but functionally
>they're more like prefixes, since they always occur before nouns,
>pronouns, and adjectives. Rules of assimilation cause _v_ to be
>devoiced before words beginning with voiceless consonants, and _k_
>and _s_ to be voiced before voiced stops. Also, longer forms of
>these words exist with vowel; they are used before words with complex
>initial consonant clusters: _v_ < _vo_; _k_ < _ko_; _s_ < _so_.
>
>Any other natlang examples of this, and also conlangs?
>
In Astou, I use some prepositions made up of only one consonnant. These
consonnants are (I use a modified Greek alphabet for this conlang):
beta /b/: at, in
gamma /g/: to, towards
delta /d/: from
zeta /z/: across, by
xi /B/ (technically a postposition): without
omega /Z/: with (company)
when needed (before a consonnant), a schwa is inserted to pronounce them.
Something particular to say about these prepositions is that they are the
only words written with those Greek letters (other words appear with those
letters, but they are in fact complements with prepositions that are so
much used that they have reached the status of adverb). Other words use
other letters for those same sounds (for instance, the sound /g/ is written
kappa-dot -the letter kappa with a dot over it-)
>Danny
>
>_______________________________________________________________
>Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit
http://www.msn.com
>
>