Re: Basque & Katzner's Languages of the World

En réponse à Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

>
> I just bought R.L.(Larry) Trask's "History of Basque" an incredibly
> complete
> and as far as I can tell accurate work (a budget-buster, alas).  Very
> conservative, no wild-blue-yonder stuff, in fact he demolishes most of
> everyone's speculations about the language.   Apparently there is a
> tapped r
> (written "r") and a trilled one "rr".  The odd thing to me is that they
> can
> contrast word-finally (I suspect it has to do with what happens when a
> suffix is added, since it seems they're written "-r" in both cases,
> unless
> I've misread.)  They also contrast medially of course, but not
> initially; in
> fact Basque dislikes initial r:  Lat. rege- 'king' > errege.  Modern
> Spanish
> loans excepted.
> Fascinating book, TOTALLY fascinating language.
>
I agree heartily! Its nightmarish verb structure, beautiful noun inflections (I
like the fact that indefinite nouns don't have number distinctions, but
definite nouns have, and that place nouns can add the local cases suffixes
directly, but other nouns need an adjunct -ta-. And of course, I love the
possibility of overdeclination that it offers!), extremely interesting syntax
(I like the fact that only the last word of a noun phrase carries the
inflection. Especially since despite being a SOV language, adjectives follow
their head :)) . It means that very often, the head of a noun phrase is not
inflected, but its following adjective is! :)) ), etc...

In fact, Basque inspired me a lot when I designed Moten. Despite many
differences in phonology and inflections (Moten has only three cases and relies
mostly on infixation to mark them), it features many things directly taken from
Basque: definite article affix (in Basque a suffix -a, in Moten an infix -e-),
overdeclination, periphrastic conjugation (like in Basque, most verbs don't
have finite forms and have to rely on auxiliaries for their conjugation. But
verbs in Moten don't inflect for person, so it gets a little easier than
Basque :)) ), SOV word order with adjectives following their head, inflection
of only the last part of a noun phrase (in fact, in Moten this phenomenon is
much more important than in Basque: in coordinated lists, only the last member
of the list is inflected, but that goes also with verbal inflection :)) ),
etc...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.