Re: Old draconic grammar and such

Geijss Streijde skrev:
 > 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
 >
 > Geijss
 >
 >
 >

Is this intended to be a Live Roleplaying language? The
consonant phonotactics are really inhuman!

As several others already have pointed out you've mixed up
phonemic and orthographic notation -- OTOH it seems to me
you have not mixed up phonetic and phonemic notation: your
[Ai] clearly is a phonetic notation, since it seems
[a] and [A] are allophones of a single phoneme, with [A]
     occurring before /i/ and [a] elsewhere. Likewise /k/ _k_
     and /x/ _c_ don't seem to be distinct next to /s/.

I took the liberty of uploading a corrected version to the
talk page, and Unicodized it as I went, using Greek letter
substitutes for [A] and [E] so that it can be viewed in
standard Windows fonts <ducking for flak>.

I perversely like _c_ for /x/, but would have spelled [sx]
as _sc_ rather than _sk_. It'd have been tempting tho, to
have a /S/ and spell it _sc_ beside _sk_ for [sx], but
that's clearly the Old English buff in me talking.

I would personally have used _q_ for /g/ and _g_ for
/N/, but that's clearly BPJ transcription habits in
their glory...

I was a bit disappointed that there were no _yi_ and _iy_. I
guess _y_ is used to break up disallowed consonant clusters.

You don't think -o- for masculine and -u- for neuter are too
similar? You don't seem to be using e/ei/ie grammatically
anywhere...

I see adjectives may be inflected as (stative) verbs. Nice!
One feature of Kijeb not documented on its wiki page is that
qualitative nouns ('redness') and adjectives use the same
root, but the adjective is verbally inflected.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
   à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
   ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
   c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)