Re: Old draconic grammar and such

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:37:26 +0100, Geijss Streijde <gijsstrider@...>
wrote:

>On zo, 2008-02-10 at 21:07 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>> Hallo!
>>
>> On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:51:56 +0100, Geijss Streijde wrote:
>>
>> > Hello, I've finished most of the grammar of the old draconic language,
>> > and would like to hear your comments on it.
>> >
>> > http://stridercorp.gethost.be/wiki/CW:Old_Draconic
>>
>> Quite nice overall; it is highly regular but that's not necessarily
>> a bad thing.  Does the name "Old Draconic" mean that it is spoken
>> by some kind of dragons?  What kind of world is it spoken in?
>
>Yes, it is supposed to be the ancestor language of all draconic
>languages. The world it is spoken in is stil in development, but is most
>likely going to be used as a backdrop for at least a couple of short
>stories.
>
Looks like it will be interesting.  You have a good start.  I hope to see
some development.

>> One nitpick: slashes are for phonemic transcription, not for orthography.
>> Use boldface or italic instead.
>
>Fixed that.
>
Ah, no you didn't.  the slashes are still there.  where you have /slashes/
now, best to use <angle brackets> or some kind of formatting.  What you have
in [square brackets] looks like it should be in /slashes/ (square is for the
phonetic realization, slashes are for the phonemic representation in the
mind of a native speaker).

>> (And using the letter _m_ for /N/ is
>> quite odd.  So is having /N/ but not /m/.)
>
>Wished to stay away from using multiple letters for single consonants,
>and using a letter not usually used for a nasal seemed worse to me.
>
Perhaps a diacritic would work.  Or you could use <&#331;> -- which is also the
IPA symbol for /N/.

What about the fact that you don't have /m/ in the first place.  Judging
from the rest of your inventory, it would seem that your dragons are, in
fact, capable of pronouncing it.  Nothing wrong with having a weird hole,
but it's good to know when it's weird.

I'd like to see the description of the number system expanded  a little bit
-- maybe with glosses for your examples to clarify.  For example you have:

>(Fetfet would be multiply by 279936 (decimal)
And then an example

>Skius fet'fet'fum dek'pius: The eleven (less literal translation, soccer team)
Obviously 279936 !<= 11.  So i'm wondering exactly how this construction
works.  And where the extra "-pius" comes from on "dek"