Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Sunday, October 11, 1998, 0:57
On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 00:12:34 -0300, Pablo Flores
<fflores@...> wrote:

>I have an idea about this too, tho only for nouns: a mixed ergative >system: > > . ergative: a subject controlling an action (THE DOG bit me) > . unergative: a subject causing a state or not controlling its own =
actions
> (THE STOPPED CAR is blocking the highway) but partly responsible > . absolutive: a subject not doing anything to an object, or an object > not receiving an action or entering a state (THE DOG sleeps, I read =
THE BOOK)
> . accusative: an object receiving an action or changing its state > (I burned THE BOOK) > . copulative: an object or subject being equated, compared or directly > modified by another thing (THE DOG is BROWN, HE got TIRED)
Hmmm... some of these might be combined, since they wouldn't occur in the same environment. Ergative/unergative sounds like a useful distinction. Perhaps absolutive, unergative, and copulative can be combined. Can = anyone think of an example that would make it useful to distinguish between = these three?
>We could have tense markers on nouns.
I like this idea; I was thinking the same thing. That would limit the number of affixes we'd need for verbs.
>* Tone, stress, length: tone is difficult (we could use pitch, but >that would definitely make this a Japanese clone ;). Vowel length is >easy for me. For English speakers, we could certainly allow variants >such as long /e:/ being both [e:] and [eI]. Someone proposes stress >rules? Possible ones are: final-syllable, first-syllable, Latin-style >(before penult if short syllables, penult otherwise), irregular (more >difficult to remember, but could be used to mark roots or to make >grammatical distinctions). Votes?
I vote for stress on the final syllable of the root.
>* Grammatical gender: none, logical, or arbitrary? Proposals: >1. masculine, feminine, neuter (extensible) >2. north, south, east, west >3. thought, feeling, material phenomenon, action, physical state, yellow >strawberry, conlanger (*very* extensible ;) >4. sounding, yelling, white, wet and sourronding (interesting!) >5. (thorough classification, withdrawn as a proposal, but still useful >for semantic fields: >6. round, square(d), flat, convex, concave, smooth, rough, big, small, >tall, short, wide, narrow, etc. (a logical physical gender, at least for >inanimate things, with several dimensions; maybe only optionally marked)
(#2 was a description of gender in Siranai, one of my language sketches, not a proposal for this language.) 7. How about limiting the number of genders to half a dozen or so = classes, perhaps "earth, air, fire, water" to begin with, and a similar number yet to be determined.
>* Gender agreement: where do we mark gender? Possible ones: >1. nouns >2. nouns and adjectives (whatever they are) >3. nouns and verbs >4. everything modifying a noun
I like marking gender on nouns and adjectives.
>* Phonology: >1. Vowels: i y e a o u (agreed so far I think) >2. Consonants: >stops p b t d k g q qg >frics f v s z kh gh h >nasals m n ng >approx w j >others l r
If the goal of one letter per sound is important, there are two sounds = too many (unless we start using numbers, punctuation marks, or capital letters). I agree that /h/ doesn't quite fit. If we lose /h/ as a distinctive sound, we can use it to mark sounds whose IPA equivalents are not easily typed (gh, nh <ng, qh <qg).
>* Syllable structure: C[w, y, r]V[V][F], where [F] =3D a generic nasal, =
a fricative,
>or /l/ or /r/. A generic nasal should assimilate to the next place of =
articulation,
>thus /m/ before a labial, /N/ <ng> before a velar, /n/ otherwise.
I'm not sure about syllables ending in fricatives. What would happen in cases like "nafza"? Would it be assimilated to /navza/, or perhaps = /nafsa/?