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