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Euphonic phonology (Was: 'Nor' in the World's Languages)

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 8, 2006, 11:29
Hi!

H. S. Teoh writes:
>... > Speaking of which... I just discovered earlier today, to my chagrin, > that langmaker.com has turned into a Wiki. What's up with the > wikiphilia?? Whatever happened to the original site?
Jeffrey had no time updating it for more than half a year after ~June 2005 IIRC, and since he did not expect less business in the future, he decided to turn the site into a Wiki. That seemed to be the only way of saving it.
> (Having said that, however, I've actually indulged in beautifying the TF > entry on the wiki, so I really have no cause for complaint. :-P)
I took the opportunity, too, but only for very minimal adjustments so far, since I am not completely native to the Wiki markup language. I would have had to search the documentation for too long to find out how to rename a page (and all references to it, of course), because the name of S17 had changed from Þrjótran to Þrjótrun and now to Þrjótrunn (actually, all forms are still good: they are adjective case forms, the first one f.sg.nom, the second m.sg.nom (formally n.sg.nom) and the last one n.sg.nom). Anyway, your description of Tatari Faran is a nice summary. The considerations about euphony reminds me: I hereby report that in S11, the conlang with only univalent 'verbs', or put differently: with case endings being an open lexical class, and the conlang that has no words yet but a large number of sandhi rules and vowel harmonies, and even a Bison parser for the grammar, I might discard the whole phonology I have so far, because any attempt of creating words has resulted in the feeling that the words sound ugly. I still hope to save it, but changes currently seem quite low. Maybe I can use at least the vowel harmony in some other language, or just freeze the project instead of cancelling it and start another language with a similar grammar but a different phonology (it was the grammar that is the most interesting part of this conlang). Currently, I have a Nahuatl-like phonology experiment running that looks promising. It is part of an oligosynthetic lexicon project (which would even fit Nahuatl morphology quite well). We'll see. I am constantly conlanging at the moment, and I have two or three active projects, plus small side projects (the Toki Pona script was one, and the musical conlang Nibuzigu another). :-) Anyway, do others also have such a hard time finding personally pleasing phonologies? I find it awefully difficult. **Henrik

Replies

Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
Dirk Elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Kate <snapping.dragon@...>