Re: Old draconic grammar and such

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:07:00 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier
<joerg_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?
>
>One nitpick: slashes are for phonemic transcription, not for orthography.
>Use boldface or italic instead.  (And using the letter _m_ for /N/ is
>quite odd.  So is having /N/ but not /m/.)
>
>... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Having /N/ but not /m/ isn't too strange, except that it does have /p/. I think
languages lacking /m/ also lack other pure bilabials, as in Iroquoian (the
reverse isn't true however; Arabic and ProtoCeltic have /m/ but not /p/). Of
course, if this is spoken by dragons, not humans, anything goes.

As for the orthography, the only thing I wouldn't do myself is use |x| for /ks/
and |c| for /x/.

Jeff