Re: A wacky language

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>
>
> >Your adpositions should be impositions (ie, go in the middle of the word).
> >Plural should be indicated by reduplication of the preceding word, and
> verbs
> >should be discontinuous (ie, consist of 2+ separate bits that go in
> different
> >places in the sentence).
>
> Well, German and Dutch already have that, and Maggel is planned to have
> that too, so I'm not sure it's such a wacky feature (Maggel is a bit
> wackier than Dutch and German as it separately conjugates both bits of the
> verb :)) ).
Well, if the German and Dutch auxilliary plus infinite main verb constructions
count as discontinuous verbs, then this is found in every Germanic language.
Seem to recall that Classical Latin also allows it. Or do you refer to
particle verbs? That's also, I'm pretty sure, found throughout the Germanic
family.

I was thinking of something rather more radical, in which every verb stem is
discontinuous.

> >  Evidentiality should be indicated by suppletion of
> >the verb stem, while imperative mood by reversing the tonal contour of the
> >verb, except on the third syllable from the right, if present.
>
> LOL. The verbs should also conjugate for future and non-future, and make no
> distinction between past and present :))) . The language should be written
> in a reverse abjad, i.e. with mandatory vowels as full letters and
> consonants not written at all or only optionally, but should have only 4
> vowels and 50 consonants, and make most of its grammatical marks through
> vowel changes :))) .
I've suggested 'dajba' for "reverse abjad", but the term does not seem to be
catching on. A shame, really.

Let's top it off with having Tibetanesque indication of syllable boundaries,
but not of word, sentence, or even paragraph boundaries. Also, while numerals
should be in base 37, written numbers should be base 23, except that numbers
smaller than 53 or so are written in unary.

                                                   Andreas

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