Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

Though well aware that the horse is now decomposing, I can't resist:

Philippe wrote:

<<But the thing is that,
before you decided you will use "-to" or "-shwrzyw",
or whatever (and how this should be pronounced), you
first had to decide that tense would be implemented by
a suffix, and before you decided that, you had to
decide that there would be a concept of tense in your
language. So you first had to think: what is tense ?
what concept is that ? shall I use it ? This of course
all IMHO.>>

Again, this isn't true.   I submit myself as a counterexample.   I'm working
on a language right now that I, from the beginning, wanted to have a
Finno-Ugric-type vowel harmony system.   For funsies, I also decided to throw
in ATR harmony.   Having no words or concepts to work with, I just toyed
around with a system.   Then it all of
a sudden struck me that I wanted to have a prefix /ki-/.   Why /ki-/?   Well,
in my vowel harmony system, /i/
is neutral with respect to rounding/fronting harmony, but it isn't immune to
ATR harmony.   Why the /k/?   I
don't know.   Maybe it's the Swahili prefix that caught my attention.   (I've
always thought it was so neat that the
word for book /kitab/ was reinterpreted as being a part of a particular noun
class, because the first CV
sequence just accidentally happens to match up with the noun class suffix.
So the singular is /kitab/, and the
plural is just like the plural for the rest of the nouns in these class,
/vitab/.   So cool!)   Whatever it was, I knew I
wanted a /ki-/ prefix, and I knew I wanted to see it a lot.   At this time,
though, I had absolutely no syntax or
morphology to this language.   However, the desire for this prefix kind of
drove me to shape a system where I
would not only have this prefix, but where it would be used often.   And so
what I did was I created a system
where noun cases are represented by prefixes.   But what noun cases?   Well,
then I had to go and decide what
noun cases my language would have.   Insodoing, I came up with a neat idea
where you could tell whether or
not a noun was definite in the accusative by the case that was used
(partitive for indefinite, terminative for
definite).   [This idea came to me by way of Finnish, Turkish and Siglit.]
Having that, I then needed to decide
how the verbal system worked, etc.

I could go on, but the point is that the phonology existed before anything.
I had no idea what the language was
going to be like: I just had a phonology.   And further, the phonology
*suggested* to me the type of language I
was to create.

<<- as I said, we indeed communicate (on the list)
WITHOUT phonology, because our messages are 100%
written. I have no microphone connected to my PC.>>

Now this is an interesting idea.   What you say is true, but, then again, all
these letters, etc., we type, evoke
sounds, since that's the point of the English writing system.   When we
create languages, we generally create
them with sounds, so even if no one speaks the language aloud, and never has,
our created languages still
evoke sounds.   Now, what if suddenly someone started writing in a purely
pictographic languages (where the
pictographs didn't look anything like the concepts they were meant to evoke).
  How would we fair?   Would it
take longer to learn this language?

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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