Re: A wacky language

Quoting Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>:

> On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Quoting Trebor Jung <treborjung@...>:
> >
> > > Merhaba!
> > >
> > > I'm interested in creating a wacky conlang, one with a crazy phonology,
> > > morphology, and syntax. Any features I should think about - that are
> crazy,
> > > unexplainable, or just weird?
>
> Christophe and I should get together and design, if that word's
> appropriate, the orthography :)
As long as I get to suggest some polygraphs! (See recent posts on "Nanoling".)

> > It shall, of course, have to be Monster Raving Loony (ie, have one case
> for
> > transitive subject and object, and one for intransitive subject).
> >
> > Phonologically, make sure it has the sublamino-velar trill (voiced and
> > voiceless), a full linguolabial series, distinguish dental vs alveolar vs
> > postalveolar vs retroflex vs palatal, syntactically determined alternation
> > between plain voiceless stops and preaspirated voiced nareal fricatives,
>
> Nareal? What's nareal?
Nareal frics are much like nasals, except more forceful, so you get
substantial friction in the nasal passages. That's my understanding, anyway -
I'm no expert on abnormal speech sounds. Supposedly, no language has them as
phonemes.

> > glottalization to indicate the locative case, and dissimilative tone
> sandhi
> > (low falling tone turns into high rising-falling before another low
> falling,
> > except utterance initial, where it goes extra high flat instead).
> >
> > Your adpositions should be impositions (ie, go in the middle of the word).
>
> Doesn't that make them infixes? Or I guess not, while 'in a dog' could be
> 'doing', 'in a big dog' could be 'big in dog', couldn't it?
As I imagined it, they might probably as well or better be described as case
infixes, but saying that would have robbed me of a golden opportunity to
misuse the word "imposition".

                                                        Andreas