Re: CONLANG Digest - 1 Nov 2000

En réponse à Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:

>
> There's supposed to be a country= (?) setting you put in one of the dos
> config files, but it's been so long since I've dealt with the innards of
> DOS
> that I forget.
>
Eh eh... With all this discussion about keyboard layouts, I think you forgot
about the famous French AZERTY layout :)) .

>
> (Conlinguistic?)
>
> Speaking of adjectival affixes...
> Does anybody know the rules of the choice of negative prefixes between
> in-
> and un-?  I know them, as it were, by instinct, but I can't quite
> analyze
> why.  The odd idea has occurred to me that it might have something to do
> with vowel harmony, or some other process?  Or is it really random and I
> just don't know it?
>
From what I know, it has nothing to do with phonetic constraints nor is it
completely random. In fact, it is linked (with a few exceptions) with etymology.
English words of Germanic origin will have un- prefix (happy -> unhappy) while
English words of Romance origin will more certainly have in- prefix (possible ->
impossible). Of course, there are exceptions (I used to know a few of them but
they escape me right now. Well, I'll probably remember them when I'm doing
something else. My memory likes to play with me like that... :) ).

>
> Another aside: _How_, just how, do things like Proto-IE *dw and *bhr
> become
> Armenian *rk and *lb?
>
I don't know for *bhr, but I know nearly by heart how *dw evolved into *rk in
Armenian. My example is IE *dwo (two) becoming *erku in Armenian:
*dwo -> *dgo -> *rgo -> *rko -> *rku -> *erku
Changes are:
- delabialization of the /w/ into /g/
- /d/ becomes a flap in front of another stop
- devoicing of /g/
- /o/ -> /u/
- addition of a prosthetic /e/
All sound changes are pefectly admissible and known to have occured in other
places and times, and they make a natural evolution from *dw to *rk, however
strange it may appear.

[snip of interesting grammatical stuff]

I like the idea of V-minus-2 position. I think it would make sense if there was
prosodic reasons, as for V2 in Germanic languages (as far as I remember, in Old
Germanic tongues, the verb was tonic when in the subjunctive mood, and atonic in
the indicative mood. And for prosodic reasons, atonic forms tended to come at
the second position in the sentence, while tonic forms stayed at the end of it.
That would account for the distribution V2 in principal clauses, V-final in
subclauses). I think it's possible to have such kind of prosodic features, don't
you?

Christophe.