Re: more blabbing about Tech, the eternally unfinished conlang

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>

> En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:
> > But that's for Old Tech. In the modern language, short vowels in open
> > syllables disappear, leaving only the residue of a palatized (for /i/
> > and
> > /e/) or labiovelarized (for /u/ and /o/) preceding consonant, but no
> > change
> > with /a/ and /@/. Words with no vowels at all will occur rather
> > frequently,
> > like /bwlw?\/ "to blossom, mature, prosper".
> I suppose you're a fan of Tamazight? ;)))))
Yeah, it's a major influence. In a way, Tamazight is "compressed Arabic",
and that along with Hebrew and Georgian (and Quebecois French) gave me the
idea of "compression", where the consonant-to-vowel ratio of a language is
increased while number of syllables and utterance time is decreased.

Northwest Caucasian languages are another influence, especially Ubykh, may
God rest its soul. There will be, in fact, a "dialect" of Tech that has the
two-vowel system of Ubykh and Kabardian, /a/ and /@/. It'll be spoken by one
of the Caucasian tribes.

> > 3) Words have a literal meaning and a number of metaphorical meanings.
> > In
> > fact, I was able to apply Bomhard's Nostratic roots in the context of
> > an
> > "erotoglossia" -- a specialized language for sexual purposes. I won't
> > get
> > into the specifics here since this is a family-oriented forum....
> Bah! American categories don't apply here! If it was a French forum you
> wouldn't even think of not sharing that with us ;))))) .
I need to refresh myself on erotic French, true... since Tech is in a way a
"satirical conlang", it'll be well-suited for politics, religion and sex.
Another feature is the fact that a word can have an alternative meaning
completely opposite of its literal meaning. I've heard of some conservatives
refer to themselves as "classical liberals"; there's an example. Or in the
religious/spiritual sense, "life" can mean "death" and vice versa
(evangelical Christians refer to the "born again" conversion experience as
"dying in Christ").

> That's a whole lot of things! I know that Itakian has plenty of dialects
too
> (including one with no fricatives! What's stops in other dialects are
rendered
> as clicks, and what's fricatives is rendered as stops :)) . I know, I'm
> evil ;)))))) ), but I just cannot work on them, they're too much! (I still
> don't know how Itakian is actually *pronounced* by the way. The distance
> between the phonemic layer and the phonetic one is considerable in that
> language)
Huh... I'm intending on filtering Tech through a lot of phonological layers.
I gotta get the "standard language" worked out first of course.

Now how am I going to come up with clicks? Those involve closure at the
velum plus the teeth, alveolus, palate or sides, so they probably would come
from reflexes of /kt/, /ktS/, /ktK/ -- or would that be more likely to be
/tk/, /tSk/, /tKk/?

> Do you have voiced implosives? If you lose the voice, they could become
> ingressive clicks I suppose (I'm not a phonetician, but that doesn't sound
> implausible). And ejectives would become egressive clicks of course ;)) .
Voiced implosives are the result of lenition of voiceless ejectives. (At
least right now.) Clicks, as I just said earlier, involve a double
articulation with one point being velar, and uvular-based clicks are
possible too, but I know of no natlang, not even Khoisan, that has such
distinction.

> Reversal? Do you mean that for neuter nouns the accusative will be the
ergative
> and the nominative the absolutive?
>
> I do like split-ergative systems anyway ;))) .
It's more complicated than that, and I'm not even close to figuring it all
out. The idea comes mostly from Georgian, which has formal ergativity rather
than functional ergativity, as in North Caucasian languages.

The neuter gender, however, will be functional, since ergative indicates a
subject/actor that's less "active" than a nominative. Only inanimate objects
can be neuter (and the neuter is based on the masculine). It could be a
subject of an active voice verb that's really playing a passive role.

Also, causative verbs would need an ergative. How would a car hit a
pedestrian? Something would have to cause the car to do such. Driver =
nominative, car = ergative, pedestrian = accusative looking for a lawyer.

So I need three cases.

> Nice! Funny enough, Maggel's construct state is often marked by initial
> mutation! (although the kind of mutation for which the mutated form of [b]
is
> [D], the mutated form of [s] is [4], and the mutated form of [T] is [C]!
;)))
> Are you planning on having maggelitinous mutations? ;))) )
I missed the post that defined "maggelity", so I'm not sure... a dialect
might have a mutation similar to modern Irish Gaelic, where /d/ lenites to
/G/ rather than /D/ as in Old Irish. MST /s/ can mutate to either /z/ or
/h/, which isn't terribly original. ~Danny~

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