Re: Modifications to Lunatic Survey

At 12:04 PM 9/25/98 -0400, Sally Caves wrote:
>Thank you David... that was wonderful!  I need to add a few questions
>to the list... one of them is the important: what is the name of your
>conlang and in a nutshell, what are its most important features?
As I said in my response to the original survey, I don't have just one
conlang, but a lot of projects in various stages of development.  Most of
them don't even have names.  But I'll list a few of the farther-along ones,
not necessarily in order of priority:

Naya Vandi ("Standard Language"):  The lingua franca of an advanced
interstellar civilization.  It's a semi-conlang (an auxlang developed by
standardizing and extending a natlang, sort of like Bahasa Indonesia);
consequently it's somewhat more regular and "logical" than one would expect
of a pure natlang.  It has a bit of an Austronesian-like feel: a very simple
phonology, with mostly CV syllables, a very isolating grammar with fairly
strict SVO word order, and an almost "typologically pure" head-modifier syntax.

Meitzanathein: the language of the Meitzanath ("People of the Disciplines"),
a quasi-religious sect that left the Naya Vandi-speaking "Mainstream"
culture to found a utopian community on a planet that's only marginally
habitable.  It, too, is a semi-conlang, but based on an ancient, extinct
language (thus more analogous to Modern Israeli Hebrew than to Bahasa
Indonesia).  It's distantly related to Naya Vandi -- typologically very
different but with some obviously related vocabulary, sort of like, say,
English and Hindi.  It's agglutinating, with a fairly free but predominantly
SOV word order.  Both its nominal case system and its verbal tense-aspect
system are elaborate and typologically very unusual.  (The case system is a
pure tripartite system, with distinct ergative, accusative, and
nominative/absolutive cases for all classes of noun phrases -- something
which AFAIK doesn't exist in any natlang, but which doesn't appear to
clearly violate any known language universals.  Aspect marking on verbs,
both in itself and in combination with case marking on nouns, is used to
make distinctions that in most languages are made lexically rather than
grammatically.)

I'm working on a language now, tentatively called Akhmentai, that has
head-modifier (VO) syntax and a grammar that's fully isolating with respect
to open-class lexical items, with inflectional morphology confined to
closed-class items.  The word order is underlyingly verb-initial, but with
topic-fronting in main clauses, giving a surface order of verb-second in
main clauses, verb-first in subordinate clauses (inspired by Matt Pearson's
Tokana).  There are lots of proclitic pronouns, including subject pronouns
that have merged with auxiliary verbs to form "tense-marked pronouns" sort
of like those of Hausa.  All case roles are marked by prepositions; there's
also a focus-marking preposition, sort of analogous to the topic-marking
postposition in Japanese.  (In fact, this language started out as a sort of
"inverse Japanese".)

There's a language that I mentioned in a post a few months ago, that's
related to Indo-European.  Its protolanguage split off from
Proto-Indo-European after the PIE case system was pretty fully developed but
before the change from a two-gender (animate vs. inanimate) to a
three-gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter) system.  It has the same
Tokana-like basic word order as Akhmentai, and some syntactic features that
are reminiscent of Greek and/or Slavic.  Basically, my intent here is to
take what I like about the "classical" Indo-European languages, while
finding historically plausible excuses for dispensing with what I don't like.

Neo-Anglic is a future language descended from an English-based creole.  The
typical isolating creole grammar has evolved into something vaguely
reminiscent of modern colloquial French, with clitic subject and object
pronouns and auxiliary verbs merging with the lexical verb, becoming
agreement-marking affixes and tense-marking affixes, and the order of noun
phrases becoming increasingly free.

A few weeks ago I posted something about a language in which verbs take the
place of all adpositions.  In fact, there are two variations of that, one VO
and one OV.

There are lots more floating around in my head, but I think I'd better quit
now and get back to my life.
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)