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New Hadwoid lang

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Saturday, July 28, 2001, 4:57
Okay, today I spent making a set of sound changes for zompist's sounds
program to transform Hadwan into Middle Atlantic (Time: c400-1500AD Place:
dragons' city Atlantis), and got it all set up to spit out perfect IPA
whatnot.

Yay.

Only but now I had a problem.  From the tidy Hadwan vowel system

    a á  e é  i í  o ó  y ý
   [A Q: E e: I i: U u: Y y:]

Atlantic develops a hideous new set of vowels, dropping length entirely:

   [@ A e E i I o O u U 9 Y y]

Well, actually it drops phonemic length.  Stressed vowels in open syllables
are longer.  And since I don't know how stress works yet, I have to mark the
stress.  Not so easy, because stressed vs unstressed looks like this:

   Unstr [ @  A O E e   i o u 9 Y]
   Str   [A E  O   I  e i U u Y y]

And I spent a while trying to find a gracious way to *spell* that.  In the
end I came up with this:

           a  à ò e è   i o u y` y
   Unstr [ @  A O E e   i o u 9  Y]
   Str   [A E  O   I  e i U u Y  y]
          á é  ó   î  ê í û ú ý  y^

I had originally wanted to spell the (tenser?) vowels (I always get tense
and lax mixed up.  I mean the ones generally SAMPA'd in caps) with grave
(unstressed) and circumflex (stressed) but since [E] is much, much more
common than [e].. it got ugly having è è è èvèrywhere.  And there didn't
seem to be any point in having â and ô without á or ó.  ... It can still use
help, since it's still too overaccentedy.  (Maybe I might decide to ungrave
vowels in case endings, where everyone, theoretically, knows how they're
pronounced, and before [G], where [e] is most common...)

Anyway,..

Having a go at a sentence:

    Arkó îg hódzhèghvêgh zhûvxechor romalhûg a zhemûg.
   [@r"kO: Ig "hO:dZeGveG "ZUvksEtS_hor rom@"5Ug @ ZE"mUg]

The grammar is not entirely certain yet, but the changes I know of so far
are implemented.  Also, imagine all those clumsy h's are the graceful
diacritical marks they're supposed to be: carons, a bar on the l, and breves
on the gs.  Eh.  I haven't checked against the native alphabet but I think
they had a better starting set of letters to begin with, so it may be less
of a problem for them.

(No, it isn't pretty.  Mellifluosity wasn't a design goal.  "Hadwan-speakers
hate elves and Romans..."  Here I feel a nurge to laugh like a mad scientist
or super-villain.  MWA HA HA HA HA.)

Eh.. anyway that's Gen 1:1 ("In the beginning, God made the sky and the
earth").  In the original Hadwan it was

    Háwarhai in házaiwos zhouxic roumalon k zhimon k.
   ["hQ:wArxAjIN hQ:dzAj"wUs ZUwksIts_h rUwmAlUNk_h ZImUNk_h]

... for comparison.  (Yeah, I used all the same roots here... Im not up to
semantic and vocabulary drift yet.)

This was the language I asked about stress changes for.. I'm still not sure
what I'm going to do about it.

    *Muke!

Reply

dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>