Re: CHAT: I'm back!

Just having done poorly at a maths exam, I'm back. While I'm sure you've
been having lots of extra-interesting discussions while I've been away just
to spite me, the chance for that is now over.

Between Christmas, a visit to my cousins' and my maternal grandparents being
in a car crash (plenty of broken bones, but they'll be out of hospital in a
couple of months ...), I've done much conlanging at all this weeks. A
noteable exception is the Tairezazh and Steianzh words for "mother" and
"father", namely T _tato_ and _mana_, S _tade_ and _mame_. With
_kezd_/_kezz_ "brother" the inventory of family terms is soon complete.

Tairezazh has also acquired a rule by which the normal/neutral SVO syntax is
changed to SOV when the verb begins in /m/ or /n/. The reason is pragmatic
enough - the regular plural marker -n is silent when the following word
begins in a nasal. By changing the word order it's thus possible the hear
the difference between _ta sens neir_ "I it like" and _tan sens neir_ "we it
like", whereas _ta neir sens_ and _tan neir sens_ are homophonous.
Unfortunately, there's no similar escape for adjectives, so in speech only
context can differentiate for instance _stelza nazh_ "energetic girl" from
_stelzan nazh_ "energetic girls". For nouns ending in consonants (the
majority), there'll be a little schwa to support the theoretical presence of
the pl -n in standard pronunciation, but in most varieties you won't have
even that little help. Some comfort may be taken in that this difficulty
only arises in the nominative and the genitive - in the accusative and
dative another consonant'll intervene between the two n's-

                                          Andreas

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