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OT: Time to cut loose? Mli Vjacgu nee Vjatjackwa

From:Amanda Babcock Furrow <langs@...>
Date:Thursday, February 23, 2006, 20:44
I am looking for direction with the conlang I'm trying to take to
usable-sketch status before I parturiate at the end of April.

Two years ago, with the much-appreciated help of several on the list,
I briefly started to invent Vjatjackwa, a Slavic-sounding language
descended through the generously donated sound-change rules of our
more linguistic-evolution-minded members from a very simple Polynesian-esque
proto-language.  However, I got bogged down in the mechanics as I am
wont to do if there are any mechanics to get bogged down in, and ran
aground on the shoals of my own sound changes (to use two completely
contradictory metaphors).

This past fall, I scrapped much of Vjatjackwa /vja'tjatSkwa/, and from
its bones built Muli (or Mli) Vjacgu /mu'li 'vjatSgu/, /'mli 'vjatSgu/.
At the moment I am unsure of two things:

1) Are my latest additions to the sound change rules overboard?  The
language description *with* the latest additions is at
http://www.quandary.org/~langs/vjatjackwa/index.html , and without them
at http://www.quandary.org/~langs/vjatjackwa/index.stage7.html .  Note
in particular that the table of correlatives (shamelessly inspired by
the one on the Vozgian webpage) loses a lot of distinctiveness on the
"who", "how much" and "why" rows.  But since the latest sound changes
are meant to be in-progress at the time the language is described, I
have an easy cop-out there.  Basically I like what they do to the name
of the language (Muli Vjacgu -> Mli Vjacgu) and the basic verb stem of
"to be" (zotu -> zdu).

2) Is it time to cut loose from running things endlessly through the
sound-change engine, and start implementing what I called Stage 8 in
the webpage:

	"Stage 8: Regularize some paradigms by analogy. Add new affixes
	and clitics using the new phonology. Apply considerable semantic
	drift to obscure origins of word pairs/triads created in Stage 2.
	Provide suppletive roots for extremely common words. Create a
	grammar."

Or shall I indulge my curiosity, and find out what happens to distinctiveness
under the new sound-change rules if the noun-form prefixes "ke" and "ta"
in the proto-language became infixes "ek" and "at", and similar infixation
governed the table of correlatives?

Amanda

Reply

Christian Köttl <christian.koettl@...>