Re: State of my Conlangs

On Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:06:42 -0500, Jörg Rhiemeier
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>> To answer a question asked earlier about the Jiggoghiid people (see
>> what I
>> did there?): they can whisper, but they lack the neural wiring to freely
>> mix and match voiced and voiceless sounds within one word.
>
> That's an interesting idea - voicing harmony taken to the extreme due to
> neural limitations of the speakers!
One thing I'm trying to do with Jiggohiid is to postulate a language for a
species much less evolved than H sapiens sapiens, mentally and physically.
Culturally, I think they'll be simple too. Probably some notion of
Religion, but I'm not sure what yet.

Linguistically, some of the limitations are:

No vaulted palate -- no way to create open vowels.
No prehensile tongue -- no way to create anything but laminal/dorsal
consonants.
No prehensile lips -- no rounding, and no bilabials or labiodentals.
Isolating language with SVO and SOV word order.
Very limited embedding. They'll say "I saw a man. He was eating chicken."
instead of "I saw a man eating chicken".
No complex tenses -- just future and non-future.
Two aspects -- aorist and perfect.
Other features here, when I can remember them.

>> I'm formulating a native Brahmi-derived script for Br'ga, but I might
>> toss
>> the notion if I can't find something aesthetically pleasing.
>
> What's the conhistory/concultural background of Br'ga?
They're on an island in the western Indian Ocean. They are pre-stone age
or early stone age hunter-gatherers. I'm vaccilating between describing
them at "first contact" (around 16xx if I'm figuring it out right) and in
the modern era. I may do both.

>> I may throw away the entire conhistory of Thagojian prior to the
>> Alphabetic
>> script.
>
> How about making them descendants of the Sea People?
I really don't know enough about the mythology and history surrounding
them, and I imagine that finding out what is known of their language might
be a large task.

>> I think I may embark on a Bible translation for Thagojian,
>
> Now that's a truly ambitious project!
I did say "embark on", not "complete" ;-)

>>        but first I need
>> to purchase an interlinear Hebrew Old Testament (I already have an
>> interlinear Greek NT). Most ideal would be an interlinear Bible with all
>> books in the languages of their earliest attested versions. I'm not sure
>> such a beast exists. Any suggestions?
>
> Well, the original languages are Hebrew for the Old Testament, and Greek
> for the New Testament.
Hebrew for the OT, I think I can agree with. I'm nervous about other
Semitic languages being involved at early stages, but I don't have any
specific examples in mind. AFAICT, I think some of the very earliest NT
books (or fragments) involve Aramaic, and I have a gut feeling that the
letters of Paul may have originally been in Latin.

>> I may produce a Thagojian Modern script, with a proper upper and lower
>> case. I will probably borrow glyphs from Cyrillic in at least some
>> cases.
>> The letter for /S/ |shima| seems a worthy candidate, since the Coptic
>> /S/
>> |shai| (and Hebrew /S/ |shin| for that matter) is tolerably close to the
>> Cyrillic /S/ |sha|.
>
> The Cyrillic letter is borrowed from Glagolitic, and possibly ultimately
> derives from the Hebrew letter.
Quite right. I may actually see what I can accomplish on this road today,
actually. There are only a half dozen characters to worry about, and I
have ideas for at least a couple of them...

wa -- Roman S
shima -- Russian She Ш
hori -- Kazakh He Һ
qopa -- Roman Q

It's really the Hebrew letters that I have trouble with, partly because
they're uncial.




Paul

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