Numerals in Calistan
From: | Danny Wier <dawier@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, January 23, 2001, 9:16 |
Well I got something worthy of presentation, finally:
Calistan, spoken on a fictitious island in the Mediterranean near Greece
named Calisto, is, basically an Indo-European language with an Arabic
phonology. It is a satem language, where PIE velars/palatals are realized as
interdental fricatives and labialized velars are simple velars. Voiced
aspirates (bh dh gh gwh) lose aspiration and voiceless (p t k kw) remain the
same, but voiced plain stops (d g gw) become voiced pharyngealized or
"emphatic" consonants, thus the Arabic influence. These are indicated by
_underlined_ letters in writing in the cases of d and edh (ð, I use dh
here). The vowel system is simplified; e/a/o in PIE are merged to a (as in
Indo-Iranian), while diphthongs of Vi and Vu become e and o. Laryngeals are
preserved as h (glottal or velar fricative) and x (palatalalveolar
fricative, the "sh" sound).
The written languages uses the borrowed Icelandic-Old English letters thorn
(þ), edh (ð) and emphatic edh (ð_). But since Mac users won't be able to see
these in posts to this list, I'll just convert them to th, dh and d_h.
I just converted Christopher Gwinn's online PIE database
http://members.nbci.com/piestudies/ by using character replacements, and so
far I have a list of numbers. Note that it is a vigintesimal system along
the lines of most Celtic languages.
henas (hen-) one
d_vah (dva-) two
trees (tre-) three
katvaar four
fanka five
sas six
saftam seven
atha eight
hanun nine
d_athant ten
hend_athant eleven
d_vad_athant twelve
tred_athant thirteen
katvaard_athant fourteen
fand_athant fifteen
saz_athant sixteen
savd_athant seventeen
avd_athant eighteen
hand_athant nineteen
d_vithant twenty
hen-ar-d_vithant twenty-one
d_vah-ar-d_vithant twenty-two
d_aþamt-ar-d_vithant thirty
d_vah d_vithant forty
hen-ar-dvah-d_vithant forty-one
tree-d_vithant sixty
katvaar-d_vithant eighty
thamtam hundred
d_vah thamtam two hundred
dhasal thousand
mirjad ten thousand
miljon million
biljon billion (thousand million)
DaW.
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