Re: Making your language sound nice

Michael Martin:
<<
Actually, the reason I came up with this idea is because I thought of a
situation where you might have genitives in both the subject and the
object
of the sentence. For example you might say, "Jack's mom doesn't like
Harold's cat."

For a locative example maybe, "The cat at the tree is watching the
bird at
Joey's foot." That one even has an accusative-genitive.
 >>

This isn't a case distinction.  That is, there's nothing that's
particularly
nominative about "at the tree", and nothing particularly accusative
about "at Joey's foot".  In English, at least, "the cat at the tree" is
equivalent to "the cat that's at the tree".  And if you tree that lower
clause, you get "that (nom) is (verb) at the tree (loc)".  Same thing
with the second.

What this seems to be is agreement.  There are some languages
that have pretty wild agreement, where each dependent of the
verb must agree fully with the verb, which itself agrees with each
dependent, so you get something like:

man-nom. give-nom.-acc.-dat. girl-dat.-nom.-acc. flower-acc.-nom.-dat.

Usually this is accomplished by case stacking though, not separate
"cases".

So presumably each of your non-core cases must have a variant
that agrees with your core cases?  So something like:

CORE
-Nominative
-Accusative
-Dative

NON-CORE
-LOCATIVE (NOM-LOC, ACC-LOC, DAT-LOC)
-ABLATIVE (NOM-ABL, ACC-ABL, DAT-ABL)
-GENITIVE (NOM-GEN, ACC-GEN, DAT-GEN)
-INSTRUMENTAL (NOM-INS, ACC-INS, DAT-INS)

So here you'd have 15 cases.

So, if all these cases have to agree with something, what happens
when they modify the clause itself?  Something like:

I ate in the library.

"In the library" here really describes the eating event, not "I".

Also, what if you have a case that modifies something that
already agrees with something else?

I ate in the cafeteria in the library.

So, presumably, "library" would have to take a locative that
agreed with "cafeteria", but "cafeteria" isn't getting a core case--
it's getting a locative case that agrees with..."I"?

MM:
<<
I have a feeling that is what I will have to do - create some rules
about
consecutive syllables ending in the same consonant. My only concern is
ending up with a modified word that resembles some other word. Like if
"chalol" became "chalor" but there was already a root word "chalor."
 >>

That's not really a problem.  We have no trouble with "red" and
"read" (in the past tense) in English.  Or "rode" and "road", "surfs"
and "serf's" (the latter in the sentence, "Give me the serf's laundry").

MM:
<<
I know a certain amount of word confusion is probably inevitable and
that's
when context is required for meaning, but I was originally hoping to
make a
language where any word could be understood even without context.
 >>

Of course, there are a number of semanticists who believe that nothing
can be understood without context.  :)  Even if something doesn't have
a specific context, the hearer brings with them an assumed "general"
context that they rely on.

Also, I'm not sure what you're doing with orthography, but if
you are, you can always do what English does.  "Rode" can never
be confused with "road" because they're spelled differently (well,
also one's a verb, and one's a noun, but you get the idea).  That
can help to straighten things up.

For example.  Let's say you have a word "chalo" and a word "chalor"
(these are their base forms).  You can have a different set of
characters for suffixes, so, say...

chalor = "bird"
chalo = "child"
chalOR = "child (acc.loc.)"
chalorOL = "bird (acc.loc.)"

This is just if you're using the Roman alphabet, of course, but even
so, in writing, "chalor" will never be confused with "chalOR".  All in
all, though, it probably won't be a noticeable problem.

-David
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