Re: New H/G lang?

Nik writes:
>>>>>>
Paul Bennett wrote:
> The lang has an enormous consonantal phono, I make it 288 consonants (3 series
> (regular, labialised & palatalised) of an 8 POA x 12 MOA consonant grid).
Could
> the human brain actually handle this differentiation in "real life"?
I don't know if MY brain could, but who knows?  As a linguistics teacher
once told the class, when speaking about consonant clusters in Polish
(his native language), "When I was a child, I didn't know it was
impossible, so I went right on ahead and learned it", or something to
that effect.  :-)
<<<<<<

Well, maybe I'm going to cut down the phono list anyway, it's a little silly.
Perhaps I'll do away with one dimension of my grid and make it a 3x4x3x4 grid
instead of a 3x4x2x3x4 grid.  Only trouble is, that cuts down the number of POAs
(and :. roots) instead of the number of meanings per root.  I want to cut my MOA
grid down to size if I can, but I don't want to break the idea of a grid.  Maybe
I could lose the "Ejective/Implosive/Click" section of the MOA dimensions,
giving 3x4x2x3x3.  That doesn't actually make much difference, though, does it?.

I don't find myself using the Palatalised series very much when I'm "riffing"
for roots, so maybe that can go, too, leaving just the following
differentiations:

Post-Labialisation:
     On
     Off

Part of mouth:
     Lips
     Teeth
     Palette
     Velum

Tongue "Shape":
     Front
     Back

Voicing/Emphasis:
     Reduced
     Normal
     Increased

Method:
     Stop
     Nasal
     Fricative/Affricate

This leaves me 164 consonants, which is better, but still a bit "out there".

>>>>>>
> there's only two vowels, would i-bar and lowered-schwa be "realistic" vowels?.
Well, the only two-vowel languages I know of use /a/ or /A/ or some
other low vowel plus schwa, but I don't see why i-bar and lowered-schwa
couldn't work either.
<<<<<<
Others have pointed this out.  I'm starting to get y'alls point, to be honest.


>>>>>>
> All roots are CVCVCV, and are defined using the "voiceless stop" row of the
> consonant table (ie {pitaca}, {xat[ika})  Each of the three syllables "moves"
to
> a different row on the consonant table (ie to Voiced Affricate or Prenasalised
> Voiced Stop) to show a different grammatical function.  For example: POS,
> Person, Tense, Degree, Reflexivity, Number etc.  Is this like any other
> (con|nat)lang?
YES!!!  Someone else had a similar idea to me!  :-)  One of my earliest
conlangs had something like that.  It was a horribly mutated version of
Celtic mutations, wherein roots were CV..VC (that is, they had to end in
VC and begin with CV, but other than that, anything, including nothing,
could go between them).  To make various changes, mutations were made to
one of those "key letters", some inflections changed the initial
consonant, others the final consonant, some V1, and others V2.  However,
mine was not so systematic.
[snip]
<<<<<<
Aha!  That (IMO) was your very downfall.  Regularity would be the key.  Think
"regular isolating analytical parent lang that is basically abused by lazy
speakers to the point of turning into mush <G> for a coupla thousand years or
so, and then spends about as long re-regularising and re-analysing itself into a
highly inflecting lang".  All this, with very limited (if any) literacy, tho
potentially, some form of (Sino-Egypto-Mayan) literacy could be the "catalyst"
for this process?

>>>>>>
> It seems to me like a kind of "inverse arabic" <G>, but that's
> probably not a very good term.  I make that 36^3 possible shades of meaning
for
> each of (8^3)x(2^3) roots?
Wow!  46,656 inflections!  That's only 4096 roots, tho.
<<<<<<
Remember the 20-root bird lang that we kicked about all those many moons ago?
That was even (fairly) strictly isolating.  I don't think I'll have many
problems.  "Confidence comes before a screw-up", I know, but I'm willing to make
a go of it.  There's the old "100 words for snow" thang in there somewhere,
though it'd probably be "47,000 words for buffalo dung", which might please
Sylvia somewhat, if I can finish it on time ;-)

>>>>>>
> How reasonable would it be to postulate this as a late-neolithic/early
> bronze-age hunter/gatherer lang?
Hmm, seems rather unnaturalistic to me for any culture, but that's just
MHO.
<<<<<<
I realise it's unusual, and not necessarily very obvious at first, but I can see
things like "all adjectives go 'hiss' at the start" and "all names for food
animals go 'click' at the end" being rather useful things to latch onto, and not
too different to the way "normal" langs work.







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