Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

On Thu, 8 Oct 1998 11:46:42 -0300, Pablo Flores
<fflores@...> wrote:

>I forgot about genitive! Right, genitive too. How are we going to render=
 those
>cases? I think noun stems should end in a consonant, so that all cases =
can be
>vowel-initial inflections. This is not very original, tho. What do you =
think?

Sounds okay. We have enough -V and -VC suffixes for cases, and many of =
the
most common noun roots could then be CVC-. Noun stems ending in vowels
(such as proper names) might add a consonant such as -h to make them
consonant-ending stems. It might be more exotic to use prefixes for =
cases,
but suffixes are fine with me.

>Also, how about word order? SVO, OVS, VOS, what? Head-final or =
head-first?
>I think everyone should take some piece of the language and work out a =
sketch.

I think it would be interesting to try SOV, with Japanese-like syntax for
things like modifiers and relative clauses, if only because I need more
practice with that word order, and most of my projects have been SVO or
VSO. OVS would also be interesting. I've been considering OVS for
Hlererhoi, but I'm still in the initial stages and changing my decisions
every day.

>We have
>
>1 noun inflection
>2 verb inflection
>3 adjectives (like nouns? like verbs? comparatives?)
>4 word order
>5 stress, tone, vowel length (?)
>
>
>--Pablo Flores
I like the case system in the Slavic languages, where adjectives take the
same cases as nouns, but the case endings for adjectives are recognizably
different from the noun endings. It would be nice to be able to tell from
the ending whether a word is a noun, verb, or modifier (which implies =
that
verb tenses/aspects/moods/voices/etc. would also be realized as =
suffixes).

Should we have grammatical gender? It wouldn't have to be as traditional =
as
masculine/feminine/neuter (one of my neglected language sketches has four
genders of "north, south, east, west"), but it's something to consider
before we go very far with the morphology.