Re: Tallefkeul: tones and whatnot

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.