Re: A brief sketch of the Ga language
| From: | Rik <rik@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, September 24, 2003, 17:50 |
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On Tuesday 23 September 2003 2:22 pm, you wrote:
>
> I finally got a chance to look at your page.
>
Many thanks!
> I haven't much to say about
> the language itself, except that I like the idea of volatile vs. stable
> consonants. The only thing that bothers me is the distribution of base and
> strong forms of the volatile consonants. Some have the voiced form as base,
> the other ones the voiceless forms. It's even stranger at the alveolar
> position where the fricative has its voiceless form as base form, while the
> stop has its voiced form as base form. Unless you have a very good
> explanation, I'd rather expect strongness to be completely aligned with
> voicelessness or voicedness, not the strange distribution you have now.
>
Noted and actioned. I had thought that making "strong" consonants all voiced
might be a bit boring - hence the mixing up. I've now come to my senses and
made the strong forms voiced - and added r, r', l and l' to the volatile
consonant list to spice things up a bit.
> My only other criticisms concern the descriptions you give. First, I really
> think you should include IPA or at least X-SAMPA to your sound definitions.
> That's because the transcription you use for the vowels for instance is
> anything *but* obvious. For instance, you describe "i" as "close front
> round". Do you really mean that "i" corresponds to [y], or French "u" in
> "lune"? And what about "o" and "u"? Are they rounded or unrounded? And "û"
> seems to correspond to [Q], rather far from its usual domain of
> application. Also, the transcription lacks consistency. "î" is the rounded
> equivalent of "e"!!! Unless there is a good reason for the transcription
> (again, maybe etymologically), I think you should rework it, because as it
> is right now it's rather confusing.
>
In my defense, I'll say that this is very much a sketch, and I doubt if the
actual phonetic values will come to rest on their final values for a while
yet - these things need to brew over time to see what's working and what's
not.
> Finally, you seem not to understand what words like "morpheme" and "infix"
> mean.
>
I agree - and I've done some thing about it. For now, I've settled on using
native words to describe the various parts that make up the words, so now we
get sentences on the webpage like: "At the core of every noun is the noun
laxmal. This laxmal always starts and ends with a matalp or matalp cluster,
and will have just one sakliq (nominalised verbs will have two sakliq and
three matalp clusters). At least one of the matalp will be matretalpksult in
nature."
I hope that this will appeal to people who like their grammars a little out of
the ordinary!
> Apart from those small imperfections, I must say I liked what I saw. You
> put together demonstrative and personal pronouns, which I did too in Maggel
> (except that in Maggel it extends even to the second and even the first
> person! :) ). And I like the noun morphology (nicely complex with its
> various classes and different morpheme shapes :)) ). I like the idea of the
> focus suffix. I may steal it for Maggel (although in Maggel if I have such
> a thing it will be obviously more complicated than just a suffix :))) ).
>
Thank you. Your feedback has been invaluable, and I'm glad you've found
something new to incorporate in your "monstrous" language.
Rik, knee deep.
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