Re: favorite aspects of conlanging

Slam!

I am having some incredible inspiration for Tech.  I just got Allan Bomhard's
little book on Indo-European and Nostratic, and my conlang is mostly based on
Nostratic with a great deal of IE influence.  I referred to Tech as "essentially
Arabic, Georgian and Sanskrit" -- and I should've added Tamil -- since it's also
inspired a lot by Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian and Dravidian as well as IE.

I was stuck on phonology for so long because I had to actually buy books to get
the info I wanted, and those books aren't cheap.  (The Bomhard work was only
thirty bucks thru amazon.com fortunately.)  Also, proto-linguistics, especially
at such a deep level as Nostratic, isn't a perfect science.  What I am probably
going to do is create a system of roots and stems from Nostratic and its
daughter proto-languages and call it Level 0 Vocabulary.  The particles and
extended roots (i.e. triconsonantals) are already complete words in themselves
and lay the foundation for Level 1 Vocabulary.

After that foundation for the language is laid, I'll go on to classical language
loanwords, Level 2.  This is where the great ancient languages come in,
including the earliest Semitic languages and the great old IE tongues Avestan,
Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.  This also completes the transition from Old Tech to
Medieval Tech.  Finally, Level 3 words come from modern languages, especially
Modern Arabic, French and English.  Neologisms based on native or nativized Tech
words would be included and may even replace Level 3 words as a "nationalistic
vocabulary"; I could call that Level 4 since this arises in the future.

So far, I have the consonant phonology pretty much down pat.  What I'm working
on is the vowel system, as the language has complex ablaut/vowel harmony
paradigms as well as resultant palatization/labialization of consonants after
merged Nostratic vowels (i/e > ja, a/@ >a, u/o > wa).  Inspired mostly by Celtic
languages as well as Hebrew and Syriac, a system of consonant mutation (fortis
vs. lenis mostly) will be added, where non-glottalized stops/affricates become
their spirant or fricative counterparts (/p/ > /f/, b > /v/, t > /T/, d > /D/, k
> /x/ etc.)  Certain dialects, by the way, made the uvulars and /p/
automatically fricative, along the lines of Arabic.

Yes I'm rambling, but I am really excited about this.  So far I've "discovered"
how to construct nominative sentences "X is Y" and imperative verbs, along with
many "immutables", that is, the particles and interjections.

~DaW~


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