Re: milimpulaktasin

En réponse à Robert Hailman <robert@...>:

> >
> > Now if you tell me that Ajuk has the same structure I'm gonna be very
> scared :)
>
> Be scared. Not very scared, but scared.
>
Oy! :)

> Ajuk's structure is (C)(r,l,j)V(C), where (r,l,j) is only allowed
> after
> dental, alveolar or postalveolar consonants. Besides that, CC clusters
> are the only ones allowed, and only medially. There is also the
> constraint that all roots end in a consonant, so root-final (I guess
> you
> could say stressed) syllables are (C)VC. All affixes are VC, except
> for
> the affixes that are consistantly final (person affixes in verbs, case
> affixes elsewhere) which are V.
>
Right, not so much different...

> Ajuk used the Roman orthography, but I have considered an orthography
> pretty much exactly like yours. What I came up with didn't really
> please
> me, but...
>
Well, mine doesn't please me either (you can have a look at it in my homepage,
Azak is one of the three langs I have things on the page about. Everything's in
French though...), but it fits the character of the language nicely...

> So, what differences do we have? Right, no CC(r,l,j) clusters allowed
> in
> Azak, roots are allowed to only have a consonant in Azak, suffixes of
> just V are allowed in Ajuk, and they have different orthographies.
>
What about your Roman orthography compared to Azak's transcription? The Roman
transcription of Azak uses the letters with their IPA value (so <j> is /j/),
except that it has no /h/ and the digraphs <sh> and <zh> mark /S/ and /Z/
respectively (nothing very original I'm afraid...).

> So, that's 4 differences, and a freakishly high number of
> similarities.
> Yeah, no need to be *very* scared, but being somewhat scared seems
> like
> the appropriate course of action. :-)
>
Yeah, unless we can find more differences in the grammar. let's see: Azak is
highly agglutinating, ergative, with no formal difference between verbal and
nominal roots (i.e. roots are not nominal or verbal by themselves. But the
suffixes are separated between nominal suffixes and verbal suffixes - with some
overlap of course :) -). It's VSO, head-first, and marks a lot of things on both
the noun and the verb. There are suffixes for definition, number, case,
possession and verbal agreement (they are the same), aspect, mood and
evidentiality (and I may be missing some things). No tense, conjugation is more
based on mood and aspect. It has a small number of interesting features, like
the presence of two genitive cases called "ergative" and "absolutive"
respectively, and the existence of a case I cannot remember the name that
transforms nouns into adjectives. It has also suffixes to reflect the state of
mind of the speaker about something (not only that s/he doubts what s/he says or
not, but also that s/he's happy about it, sad, surprised, polite, rude, etc...).

Well, as a whole I consider it as a transition conlang. Before it, the conlangs
I created were really amateurish, and quite hollow really (self-critic). Merely
trys all worth forgetting about. After it came Astou, Reman, Moten, Notya (plus
two other projects that I would resurrect later as O and Narbonósc), and then I
became acquainted with the list, and the ones who were already here then know
the rest :) . In that respect, Azak shows features of both periods: it's still
rather amateurish, but it shows that I had begun to have a better insight in
languages than I had before (well, since I had *none* before, I could only do
better :) ). Its creation coincides with the moment I began to read linguistics
books incidentally :) . Well, for that reason I think it's worth looking at :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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