Re: Nuif (was: TRANS: Ideas)

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
>En réponse à Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:
>> >> Interlin:
>> >>     el  impórtaant  n'êt   di avier
>> >>     El  im"pOrtA:nt nEht   di "Avi:r
>> >>     DEF important   NEG-3S to have.INF
>>
>> <el> /El/ should probably be <ul> /Yl/... there's a change there I'm not
>> too
>> sure of yet.
>>
>
>What kind of change would it be? /i/>/y/>/Y/ (maybe influenced by the /u/
>present in the ending of illum in the accusative)?
Well I am not sure whether the /ll/ would have any effect on the /i/.
I don't quite remember but I think the change I had in mind was

/illu/ > /i5lu/ > /iwlu/ > /ylu/ > /Yl/

but that doesn't look so right anymore.

>> >>     mul      idées,  meis di viver    oun
>> >>     myl      i"dE@   mEjh di "vivr=   un
>> >>     thousand idea.PL but  to live.INF one
>>
>> And I'm not entirely sure of the stress on <viver>.
>>
>
>Indeed, it's one of those pesky -ere verbs with short e, stressed on the
>antepenult. In French the stress didn't move, and the short e disappeared (thus
>French 'vivre'), but in Spanish those verbs were transferred to the -ire
>conjugation and the stress put back on the ending (thus Spanish 'vivir' with
>final stress). As I see it, it seems you take the French approach (the stress
>stays on the initial syllable and the e disappears), but in your language this
>disappearance is compensated by r becoming syllabic (which seems to indicate
>that this change would have occurred after the disappearance of final -e's, but
>it's quite possible that that one happened early on). I personally don't see
>anything wrong in that. French is a good precedent in the keeping of that
>stress position.
Yes that pesky -ere !
I am not actually sure which way I want to go on that yet, Spanish way or
French.. although going from original principles it might be the Spanish one
(leaving us with ... vivier /vIvir/, I suppose--not too sure about tense v. lax
vowels yet)

>>     vrader /"fradr=/ "brother" (pl. vradres /"vradr@/)
>
>With v?
Yeah I was thinking about this just last night at work... one of those is wrong,
lol :p
The sound of that initial has gone back and forth, I think.

    /fr/ > /vr/  (voice assimilation)
    /vr/ > /fr/  (fricative devoicing)
    /fr/ > /f_v/  (initial fricative voicing)

So maybe it would be /"f_vradr=/

>> (I'm not exactly sure what kind of /r/ Nuif has yet..)
>
>Well, apart from French, all Romance languages have an alveolar flap or trill.
>Only French has an uvular fricative. It mostly depends on where this language
>is supposed to be spoken.
Well, it's supposed to be spoken in America actually.
I have been hearing it with an uvular fricative though, even though that makes
some words almost impossible for me to pronounce--like muirt /mVHGT/ 'dead'.
(ok, well, /mVHGt/, but [mVHGT] for some odd dialectal reason has popped up in
my head).  [And I have just received deja vu about typing 'mortuu' and 'morte'
into phono.. hmm...]

>> The long vowels come from, hmm, stress shifts (the stressed vowels were
>> a bit longer and stayed long when the stress moved away from them) and,
>> hmm, final vowel loss in some of the verb declensions
>>
>>     jo fole  /j\O fO:l/
>>
>
>So basically the long vowels are not the reflection of Latin's long vowels?
That's right.  Although I'm not exactly sure the rules are anything like what I
just described.   [I had it all planned out...]    But given the way Latinate
stress works, I think that many of the words with penultimate stress (i.e., long
penultimate syllable) will have that vowel be long in Nuif.

>>Neat! Middle French also had a long/short vowel distinction that didn't
>>originate with the Latin long vowels. It didn't keep them for long though.
I will look that up... I had a book on Vulgar Latin to Romance changes and
another on Old French from the library but didnt get much time to look at
either.. will have to get them again to work stuff out.


    *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/