Re: My conlang: opinions welcome

On Apr 10, 2005 12:08 AM, Gregory Gadow <techbear@...> wrote:
> I've taken my conlang, Glörsa, out of the box where it's been living for a
> long while, dusted it off, replaced a few springs, oiled it's hinges,
> ordered new treads, gave up waited for them to come in from the one
> factory in the world that makes them and gave it a shiny new coat of
> paint. Then, I posted it to the web at
> http://www.gregory-gadow.info/conlangs/glorsa/Introduction.asp
Some observations:

You appear to have |ü| but no |u|. That's weird, although not
necessary wrong. I assume that's because |u| would be [U], but there
is no /U/.

I find it fascinating that /V/ (spelled |w|) is considered a
consonant. How does this work? Can it actually act an an onset: is
|wa| [Va] a valid syllable? When I try to pronounce this I wind up
making a kind of voiced pharyngeal onset, and nothing that could
accurately be called [V].

As another have commented, in your section on noun case you seem to
have true cases (instrumental, associative, locative) mixed in with
numbers (collective) mixed in with discourse markers (intimate). These
are not really the same thing, and should be distinguished in the
grammar. (Unless, of course, you're simply translating a native
grammar, and you think native grammarians misunderstood their language
in this manner.)

The collective really should go with the quantifiers. Unless you
actually mean for them to go together--but what would it mean? What
would _fandan-adris i:div_ mean? (Using colon in place of umlaut.)

Likewise, what you call "declension" seems to be more like what
linguists call "gender", and what you call "gender" seems to be no
more than simple lexical regularity. (In English, all nouns ending in
-tion are abstract nouns, but that doesn't mean that English has an
"abstract gender" of nouns ending in -tion.)

I haven't had time to look over the verbs yet, but they look pretty
good. A question: Is it possible to use more than one modifier at the
same time?




> There is still some work to do, of course (is a conlang ever really
> finished?) Right now, I'd like some feed back on the structure and whether
> you think there is anything that needs to be expanded upon or if I have
> missing information that belongs in what's up.
>
> Thanks in advance for your constructive criticism.
>
> Gregg
>

--
JS Bangs
jaspax@gmail.com
http://jaspax.com

"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
 - Pedro the Lion