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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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