Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

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 (thorough classification, withdrawn as a proposal, but still useful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/?