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
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