Delayed response again! Had a rough day yesterdiddly, but here goes.
From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
> I just need to use that in Maggel! From now on, the word |bltafj| ['bK\Ev]
(now
> *that's* a tongue-twister for me!!! ;) ) which until now meant "strange,
weird"
> will also mean "cool" ;))) (OK, not exactly an opposite, but you get my
> drift ;))) ).
>
> And now I'm expecting "bltafj" to be adopted by the list as a new synonym
> of "cool" ;)))) (only if you can spell it correctly ;) ).
I don't have a word for "cool" (or "cold, freeze, ice") yet, just a bunch of
words for "hot, warm, fire, burn". In fact, I also only have words for the
numbers six and seven: |s@ks| and |s@bt| (obviously stolen from I-E).
> Do you mean that neuter nouns will be identical to masculine nouns, except
that
> they will have an ergative-absolutive rather than nominative-accusative
> distinction?
Pretty much. Not sure yet though; I'm a good ways from working out the
grammatical details.
> Common among split-ergative languages. I know they usually use the
genitive as
> an ergative (IIRC). Is that an idea?
That's an idea. Georgian is weird; the subject can be nominative, ergative,
or dative while the object can be nominative or dative. It depends on the
tense and class of the verb. The "screeve" system is something I still don't
grasp. Kartvelian languages are kinda like Native American languages with
surprising lexical similarities to Indo-European.
> Maggelity /m@gE:lIti/ (noun) The state of being entirely unpredictable.
> [from _Maggel_ a constructed language by Christophe Grandsire, which had
> an unpredictable orthography +_ity_]
Techism: speech involving difficult consonants and consonant clusters.
> Oh well, having mutations at all is already a nice step ;)) . Who knows,
if you
> implement the mutations in Old Tech, maybe the sound changes until Modern
Tech
> will provide for insteresting Maggelish mutations ;)) .
Well, the mutations are pretty predictable, just as much as they are in
Biblical Hebrew. The language will at first be quite regular and not so
maggelish (that really sounds like a Yiddish term we haven't heard of yet!).