Re: Zhyler Vowel Harmony

In a message dated 04/15/02 4:37:34 PM, jaspax@U.WASHINGTON.EDU writes:

<< David, I looked over your vowel alternations and loved them.  However,
when I sat down to do an internal reconstruction, I couldn't come up with
anything that made sense and wasn't unbearably complicated.  What's the
historical basis for the alternations?  All of my complicated scribbling
was eventually for naught, and now I'm dying to know where all of this
came from, and why. >>

    There's no historical basis (I don't derive things from proto-langs, or
even think about it; I just try to simulate the way present-day languages
look).  However, if you were to try to reconstruct something, you certainly
couldn't do it only with information I posted.  You'd have to look
specifically at the contexts in which those underspecified vowels arose.
Many could derive from the same vowel, but only after certain consonants or
before.  Some of these have some sort of logic to them, I noticed (for
instance, the set that I assigned /W/ occurs only after [w], and the same
goes for /J/).  Now I'm interested.  I'm going to see if I can reconstruct
something myself...

-David

"fawiT, Gug&g, tSagZil-a-Gariz, waj min DidZejsat wazid..."
"Soft, driven, slow and mad, like some new language..."
                    -Jim Morrison