Re: Terkunan revision (adding a lot of Rhodrese)

Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
>...
> Sure, although IMHO to have _-z/-s_ in some forms and not
> in others, even if the ones who have them are monosyllabic
> determiners, feels strange to me. The reasonable
> explanation for the loss, *especially in an Iberian
> context* would be a rule
>
>      s > 0 / _#
No, there is no such rule in Terkunan.  The plural endings
dropped for some other reason.

> and so it should apply everywhere. The one plural form I'd
> expect to survive would be _li_ < ILLÍ, since there the
> plural marker happened to be stressed, and of course in the
> pronouns, which were suppletive. So you'd get
Well, I really don't like the vocalic plurals, I want the -s.  (The
usual accusative plural story.)

> >|    mi  ~ miz
> >|    no  ~ noz
> >|    tu  ~ tuz
> >|    vo  ~ voz
> >|    tor ~ torz
>
> What's _tor_? _otro_?
< 'tua horda'.  A 'representative' 2nd person pronoun used when
talking to representatives of companies on the phone.  You can then
insult the company without upsetting the person on the phone
personally.

>...
> >| f.sg.   idda    _dd_ = /d\`/
> >| m.sg.   iddu
> >| pl.     iddi
> >
> > So there would be your Romance natlang that does it.
>
> Thanks! However assuming an _-e_ > _-i_ merger before i-
> umlaut would cause too much i-umlaut, e.g. in third
> declension singulars!, so i-umlauted plurals of first
> declension nouns will probably be analogic in Rhodrese.
> However Rhodrese has a /-@/ > /-I/ change later, so that
> Latin -A will show up as /-I/! I saw somewhere that
> _dimanche_ was "_dimanchi_" in Lyonese patois and had to
> seize on it, and then a wholesale reduction of unstressed
> vowels to /@ I U/ lay near. It will not be reflected in
> spelling however! I really will have to play around with
> your schcompile to determine the exact sound changes and
> their order.
I was thinking of reducing the unstressed syllables, too, but decided
against, because I was beginning to implement *all* features I found
interesting in Italian dialects, and it was just too much.  I like
your /@ I U/ (or is that /a i u/ ~ [@ I U]?), and I don't know how
Sicilian is actually pronounced -- seems resonable.  In
Westgreenlandic, short vowels do much the same, IIRC (additionally,
they adjust a bit around uvulars), because with only three vowels
around, there is a lot of freedom for a vowel anyway.

BTW, some variants seem to have reduced many stressed syllables to /a
i u/, too, and even did something I experimented with to unstressed
syllables: spreading /a/ a bit in unstressed syllables so that VL
/E/ and /O/ > /a/.  Well -- there are the following words in Sicilian:

      alèttrica        'electrical'
      rapprisenta      'he/she/it represents' (I think)
      raccumannamu     'we recommend'
      asempiu          'example'

:-)

Wikipedia is nice -- I has a lot of Sicilian and Sardinian
texts... :-)

>...
> That's the way SUUS worked in Latin, but *all* Romance
> natlangs have changed it to mean 'his/her' In fact that
> change was fully completed in Late Latin texts, so the
> chance that a Romance language avoided it is slim -- at
> least in OTL.
Well, Terkunan's a fauxlang.  It is meant to be a romlang that is a
good mixture of typical and untypical, and most of all, pleasing to
me.  I don't want to stick as much to historical feasibility as with
Þrjótrunn.  I deliberately chose to keep the Latin version.  We'll see
whether the current version is final.

>...
> > *_futus_ is the basis for that participle in Þrjótrunn
> > and in Terkunan. An analogical reconstruction of
> > _futurus_, of course.
>
> Well, _bhûta-_ does exist in Sanskrit, so a *FUTUS **may**
> have survived in your ATL.
Yeah, I always found this was a very feasible keep. :-)

>...
> What happens to FIERI?
Currently gone.

>...
> > I am currently also considering dropping the verb's -a
> > ending. Another step towards French... We'll see. It would
> > mean that nouns and verbs are indistinguishable on the
> > phonology level, but then, before vowels, this was always
> > the case anyway, and my word class markers are more
> > irregular than regular, and thus a but half-hearted. This
> > would mean to drop the concept of marked word classes
> > completely.
>
> Do *all* verbs, and not only those of the first conjugation
> have this -a ending? If so it should probably go! :-)
Well, I tried, but it wasn't satisfactory.  I like the -a
stuff I currently use.  It did change the rules about when
it drops, however, and it drops much more often.

>...
> |        Indef.        un kan        ni kan
> |        Def.          le kan        li kan
>
> Removes the 'Sohlobism' of the unmarked form being the
> indefinite plural, although I think you can in practice get
> that effect in some OTL creoles too.
I would not want this because -e is quite close to -i and n- sounds
very similar to l-.  I really like my -s. :-)  I currently
have:

        sg.    pl.
indef.  un     nus
def.    le     les

**Henrik