Conlang: Re: A Conlang, created by the group? (Christophe Grandsire, Oct 12 '98, 10:11)

>> . 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 (thorough classification, withdrawn as a proposal, but still useful 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] = a generic nasal, a

From:	Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:	Monday, October 12, 1998, 10:11