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Re: Tallefkeul: tones and whatnot

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 27, 2002, 9:56
En réponse à Christopher Wright <faceloran@...>:

> > You're cruel. That would just about destroy all meaning that the tones > carry.
Not mandatorily. After all, you said that only the first syllable of words carried a significant tone. Your sandhi rules could modify only the last tone of a word, depending on the tone of the following word. I do that in Itakian, where tone sandhi doesn't modify the high tone of the first syllable of the trigger. The tones around may be modified, but this grammatically significant tone is never changed. Unless, of course, I can make the pre-sandhi form somewhat
> predictable. I think I'd have to add two more tones: mid-falling and > mid-rising. I'll call them Down and Up respectively, just for quarks.
7 tones? Are you trying to make a new Hokkien, the native lang of Teoh? ;)))
> > Are there no bounds to your spite?
No there aren't ;))) . It's just too much fun to put any limitation ;)))) . *sigh* I simply don't have the
> patience to reach your level of irregularity. Perhaps I should > overdose > on laxatives. >
I never used any :))) . As for reaching the level of irregularity I did, it's not that difficult: just make a bunch of rules, and then never follow them ;)))) (I admit I cheated, since I also made a bunch of strange and contradictory rules to follow when I'm too tired to really make irregular things). Last nice word in Maggel: the preposition |ga|, pronounced [N&] (&: ae- ligature). Irregular orthography (|g| normally never denotes [N], there is the digraph |jm| for that job ;))) ), and a funny meaning: it means "above" (without contact with the surface) or "on" (with contact), depending on whether the article is used with it or not, but it also indicates that the object that is "on" or "above" is in a situation where it can be described as lying or sitting (sitting being used normally only for humans or animals), i.e. in a situation where apparently it's largest dimension is horizontal (or at least the vertical part is unimportant). For objects that would be better described as "standing up", there is the preposition |lu| [lY] for the job (it behaves exactly as |ga|, but for standing-up objects). The funny part is that besides their spatial meaning, those two prepositions also have different derived meanings, in which cases only one is correct. For instance, |lu| is also used to mark the complement of a comparative of superiority (like in Japanese, adjectives in Maggel are not modified for comparative meaning and it's the preposition used with the complement that indicates which comparative is meant). |ga| cannot be used with this sense. On the other hand, |ga| is used to form ordinals of big numbers (because big numbers in Maggel are nouns and cannot be used as normal numbers), the idea behind the expression being that the millionth item can metaphorically be seen on top of a pile of one million items. In this sense, |lu| cannot be used. Note that there isn't any such differentiation for the opposite position. |uir| [Ux], which means "under", doesn't make a difference between a standing or lying position. Hehe, what do you think of that? It looks awfully strange, but actually it doesn't look that unnaturalistic. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that some natlang has such a distinction. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.