Re: New H/G lang?

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.  :-)

> 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.

> 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.  For instance, one change involved "labial
-> dental, dental -> velar, velar -> uvular, uvular -> labial, so seeing
a "p" for instance, you couldn't no whether that was a root, or a change
from uvular or a change from dental (another mutation used the opposite
direction), vowels had changes such as lowering (low vowels became
high), raising (high became low), etc.  Very artificial-feeling and
virtually impossible to find the root, such that I had to ignore the
initial and final groupings when making roots, so that I didn't have a
root that could mutate into another root (that is, kapedaf would be
listed as -ped-, so that I didn't make, for instance, gapedov which
could mutate to "kapedaf", and when trying to find what the form of a
word was, I had to look at the inside, look up on the table to find the
full root form, and then figure out which mutations were made on it.
Yuck!  :-)

> 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.

> 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.

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