Re: Tekem, the language (aka deriving verbs from nouns)

Amanda Babcock sikayal:

> First, I wanted it to have a minimal phonology, be synthetic rather than
> isolating, and be agglutinative.  This threatened nightmarish amounts of
> work in keeping things unambiguous, so I added a system of sandhi the
> likes of which probably does not occur in human languages (that's ok by me;
> I'm going for consistency but not necessarily naturalism, and will claim
> the speakers are non-human if pressed :)
Actually, after reading this I'm most concerned about the morphology.  The
phonology seems rather reasonable, but the morphology you've created seems
to go too far with a single root.  You wind up with rediculously long
words for common things, whereas in any natural language those words would
have their own roots or at least have shorter derivations.  I'm not saying
that you should necessarily change the whole system, but you might
consider replacing some of the really long derived forms with simpler ones
as you expand the language's vocabulary.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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