Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

Christophe wrote:
>It sure gives another image of French than traditional grammars give
doesn't it? :))

>Oh, and if you want a run-down of [sga'la], here it is: -ga- is the root,
meaning "guy".....

What is "ga-" in real life?

>One day I'll just have to write a "true grammar" of French, taking only the
Spoken French evidence, and not looking at its spelling ever :) . I'm sure
the whole thing will look like anything *but* a Romance language :))) .
Hence a new essentialist: French is essentially Inuktitut disguised as
Latin :))) (although it's probably already in the list :) ).

Yes you should.  And perhaps, harking back to an earlier comment, and to
make it look even less like a Romance lang., you should consider analyzing
it without schwa-- I've actually seen such analyses, where e.g. morphemes
like /l/, /Z/, /n/, /m/, /t/, /s/ etc. simply have their schwas inserted by
rule. It's wrong-headed of course, but it can be done...........  (Though I
don't recall how these analyses dealt with intra-morphemic schwa, as in
/pëti(t) ~pti(t)/ )  Although native speaker intuition and history says
"schwas are deleted", it makes the rules only slightly more complicated if
OTOH you say "schwas are inserted".

IIRC the only major problem is accounting for /dy/ "du" < //d+l+[C]//.  But
I'm sure the mind that created Maggel will have no trouble with a rule
whereby  l > y between consonants.....:-))))))))))))

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