Re: Too far in to make major changes?

In a message dated 3/19/2000 12:47:58 AM Eastern Standard Time,
tuozin@DMV.COM writes:

<< I was thinking about adding tones. >>
    Perhaps not a good idea.  Earlier today I happened to be reading
P.Flores' essay on creating a conlang, where he counsels against tones unless
one is familiar with such languages.  And from personal experience, it seems
to require a lot a reprogramming of the average W.Eur. mindset.  From the
rest of your post, I get the impression you really don't want to, anyway.

>> One might recall that the -le
 plural marker became "archaic" when I realized that "dile"
 ("testicles") looked just like "dile" ("toilet")... I didn't want
 to go back and revise all the possibly confusing -le words,...>>
    Were there so many?  Even 1.dile/2.dile would seldom give rise to
confusion as they would rarely occur in the same environment-- "He kicked him
in the ...."; but "his.... were swollen",  "the ... doesn't work", etc.
aren't a problem, especially if you have sing/plur verb form.  Lots of
languages have homonyms, and actually, they can be viewed as a resource-- for
deliberate ambiguity, humor, puns, double-entendre etc. ("How do you make a
Venetian blind? Poke him in the eye [groan]") I'm not familiar with ea-luna,
but am guessing it's sort of a Polynesian CVCV lang., which would indeed
produce lots of homonyms.)

>>so I dropped the plural except in certain words where there would be
 no confusion ("lale" -- "we") ...>>
    Yes, that's one way around it.  Another might be, make the PL suffix (and
some, others?) stressed, which would probably do less damage to the sound of
the lang. than tones would.  Tending towards tonal, but not really, would be
a system like Japanese, where you step up/down on a given syllable
(unpredictable, I think). But if only PL is the problem, this might involve
as much re-working as tones.

 On the other hand, the reason that ea-luna looks and sounds the
 way it does is that I really did want a limited number of sounds
 to work with, and when I have read longer passages of ea-luna
 aloud to myself, or recorded them and played them back, I really
 like the sound of it now. >>
    I think you've answered your own question ;-))

Just in passing, I'll mention that I'm trying to devise a tonal language for
the 2nd intelligent species of Planet Cindu.  Am vaguely aware of how tones
are believed to have arisen-- would be interested to hear whether tonal
languages also have intonation patterns for sentences, especially questions.