Re: Accusative or not accusative; that is the question

Den 27. sep. 2006 kl. 19.52 skrev Santiago Matías Feldman:

> As regards Urianian, that's interesting. The
> description you're giving fits very well with my
> Romlang Laturslav. It's IE with Turkic substrate
> influence.
>
> And is it Urianian agglutinative too?
No - the substrate language, which happens to be identical to my
other conlang Gaajan, is (kind of) agglutinative, but its influence
hasn't gone that far on Urianian. In fact, Gaajan was in the process
of relaxing its agglutinativity when the Urianians came. To repair
it's loss of prepositions, Urianian uses participles and
prepositional phrases. The latter I'm not quite sure how to handle
yet. But I have an example or two in the recently posted poem
translation.

> Is it supposed
> to be related to the Indo-Altaic family in some way?
No, more closely to Germanic-Baltic-Slavic. For Gaajan I am trying to
make a blend of Basque and some Caucasian languages that seem to be
its closest relatives. But I have taken a few hints from some other
pre-IE European languages too, trying to make something coherent out
of it.

Actually I have been wondering if Urianian may be construed as
identical to Pictish, because some Pictish king names can be analysed
as Urianian. I know Picts spoke a language related to Brittonic in
the latter part of their history, but there may be a pre-Celtic
stratum too. (Which I feel tempted to annex.)

> The name reminds me of the Urals, but perhaps it
> doesn't have anything to do with them?
I don't think so, but that question actually has been in very hot
debate among Urianian linguists the last couple of hundred years, as
you can imagine. It may be related to 'ur' - water, Old Urianian
u:ris (n) 'water', u:ra: (f) 'river'. The rain goddess is called Uri,
and the people came across the water from the east to settle in the
country. But then there is also a town, Uria, which today is the
chief administrative centre of the Urianian population and the seat
of their first academy, founded in 1833 (thus the written language is
based on the Uria dialect), but it has only had this position for the
last 2-300 years or so. Another alternative which has been debated is
the 'ur' word meaning 'man, human' in the Uria dialect. But this is
'vir' elsewhere in the high country and 'fir' or 'fyr' in the
lowlands, going back to OU wi:ros, so this alternative today is
largely dismissed.

(I can go on endlessly like this, if you don't stop me.)

:-) LEF