Re: Lason Agsem

On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> At 20:22 24/01/00 -0600, you wrote:
> >
> >Let me give you some examples of paradigms, and see what you think:
> >
> >l'ehef - to love
> >ehefen - loved
> >ehefendo - loving
> >
> >                perfect
> >1       ehefti          ehefnu
> >2       ehefta          eheftem
> >3       ehef            ehefu
> >
> >                imperfect
> >1       ehef            nehef
> >2       tehef           tehef
> >3       jehef           jehefu
> >
>
>         Interesting: perfect shown by suffixes and imperfect by prefixes. I like it.
Taken almost entirely from biblical Hebrew.  ;)  Of course, I realized
late last night that this leads to some oddities.  For example, "I create"
in Hebrew is "evra" but, in Agsem, although it's from the same root, it
comes out "ebar".  There's a fertile ground here for some irregularities,
I think.

Anyone familiar with Hebrew want to conjugate "hayah" for me in the
perfect?

> >Nouns:
> >
> >sad - demon     sades - demons
> >amijo - friend  amiji - friends
> >seme - seed     semi - seeds
> >miseri - mystery miseres - mysteries
> >nimpa - nymph   nimpaj - nymphs
> >
>
>         Are there some mappings, or do we have to learn each plural with its
> corresponding singular? (it's not implausible for a secret language to have
> such strange feature - even non-secret languages like Arabic have it :) - )
Some irregularities are bound to creep in -- maybe some vowel changes in
the roots, influence from English, you know.  But these examples are all
regular:

Any noun ending in a consonant makes the plural by adding -es
Any noun ending in -i turns the -i to -es
Any noun ending in -o or -e turns the final vowel to -i
Any noun ending in -a adds -j

> >ng -> nc
> >gn -> cn
>
>         Such devoicing is rather strange. I don't know if it's plausible to have
> devoicing of a stop which is next to a nasal (normally voiced). Maybe a
> kind of dissimilation.
Hmm, maybe I'll get rid of this.