Re: New language under development

Hello!

On 5/31/05, Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 May 2005 16:46:40 +0300, Julia "Schnecki" Simon
> <helicula@...> wrote:
[snip snip]

> >- phonetics: six vowel phonemes (/i/, /E/, /@/, /a/, /O/, /u/) and
> >oodles of consonants. My original phoneme system had an amount of
> >consonants that any Pacific-Northwestern (is that a word?) language
> >would be proud of; now I'm trying to get that amount to below 30 or
> >so, possibly lower. I'll probably spend at least part of the weekend
> >playing with assimilation and dissimilation phenomena, in order to
> >reclassify some of those consonant phonemes as allophones of something
> >else...
>
> Any phonemic or allophonic vowel lengthening?
Not yet, at least. But I'm just getting started...

> It seems like /@/ and /a/ could have arisen partly from allophony.  Same
> with /i/ ~ /E/ and /u/ ~ /O/... plus there may have been some earlier
> diphthongs that were smoothed.  Lots of possibilities, from an internally
> historical linguistics point of view. :P
You're right. ;-) At least /a/ and /@/ show similar behavior with the
assimilation rules I have so far... and I didn't even plan for them to
have a common ancestor phoneme...

I'll try to keep this in mind while working on my phonology. Maybe the
two front vowels and the two back vowels each come from a tense
(stressed, long, ...) and a lax (unstressed, short, ...) variant of a
common ancestor... who knows. We'll see.

[snip]

> >I'm sure, though, that I won't have phonemic tone. Or ablaut or vowel
> >harmony, for that matter.
>
> What about sandhi?
>
> Oh, oh... what about... umlaut?!
Well, there's probably going to be some sort of sandhi.

As for umlaut, I was about to write something about how I'm not
planning any so far, but then I remembered that some of my vowel
assimilation rules (like /a/ becoming /E/ in the vicinity of /i/)
could be considered instances of umlaut. So there. :-}

> >I've also come up with a number of assimilation rules for vowels.
> >Basically, when a high vowel (/i/, /u/) and a non-homorganic non-high
> >vowel meet, the place of articulation of the non-high vowel moves
> >closer to that of the high vowel (e.g. /a/+/i/ -> [Ei];
> >/i/+/O/ -> [i@]). I hope to be able to find some simple rules to
> >describe this; I'd hate to have to list all possible vowel pairings
> >separately... -- Also, interesting things will happen to consonants
> >adjacent to an assimilated vowel... I hope. ;-)
>
> Labialization and/or palatalization?  Phonemic or phonetic?
Well, definitely not phonemic. ;-) It's part of my master plan to
reduce the number of consonant phonemes in my original draft of the
phoneme system, after all. And yes, there probably will be some
labialization and palatalization (hey, there's only so many things you
can sensibly do to a consonant that happens to land next to a /u/
resp. /i/).

> >- morphology: Reading up on Nahuatl was what triggered this explosion
> >of linguistic creativity in my mind; so, as I mentioned, I started out
> >with the idea to have a morphology similar to that of Nahuatl, but not
> >too much so. I eventually decided to keep some of the good stuff
> >(person agreement all over the place; and of course that old favorite,
> >noun incorporation) and change the rest.
>
> Subject and object affixes on verbs?
I hope so. I still haven't thought much about verbs yet, I must
confess...

[snip snip]

> Finally, what... about... accentuation?  Stress or pitch?  Free or fixed?
Wow! You're, like, five steps ahead of me. ;-) I'll probably start
thinking about accent when I have some actual stems and word forms to
place it on, and I won't have any of those before I can make up my
mind about the phoneme system. So, sorry, but you'll have to wait a
little longer. (I could start thinking about it now, but I'd probably
throw whatever I decide out the window anyway as soon as I have my
first words and realize that with *those* accent rules they sound just
plain ugly.)

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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