Re: CHAT: TRANS: something slightly more deep (was: TRANS: flutes)

In a message dated 2/8/2000 5:10:23 PM Eastern Standard Time,
jmpearson@FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU writes:

Hello Matt, and all:
<< I've never heard of Kash before.
    Not surprising; tho it's appeared a little on Langmaker
 Are you new to the list?
     Yes.
 If so, have you already introduced yourself?
    No. Herewith:  A once and always linguist.  My field: Hist/comp.
Indonesian area.  A very dark corner, few were called, even fewer were
chosen. In the world of publish or perish, I perished and am now mostly
retired from whatever else it was I was doing.  I know Spanish and
Malay/Indonesian, Dutch and the usual suspects for research, plus a clutter
of bits and pieces of lots of others.  Conlanging off and on since teens.  A
linguist with time on his hands is a dangerous thing.

  <<Anyway, I like the look and (what I can figure out of) the structure of
Kash, and would love to learn more about it. >>  Thanks. >>Do you have a
website? >>Not yet, if ever; I'm still trying to figure out e-mail.  Oh to be
15 again.( Well, not really)
>>If not, a short sketch of Kash for the list is in order.  >>See below.
>>The symbol that you use in the more correct spelling of "Kash"
 comes out as a degree sign on my computer.  Is it meant to be
 IPA /S/ as in "ship"?  Perhaps you should stick with "sh" (or some
 other typewriter-friendly spelling) when posting to the list. >>
    Sorry about that.   Yes, it is /S/, English "sh"-- I used ASCII 0154.
How about the n-tilde?  ASCII 0241, but it seems to transmit better.  And the
accent marks?  One never knows.

Very brief intro to the Kash language:
Originated about 20 yrs ago when I mentally plotted out a "first contact"
story, abandoned when it turned into a rerun of "The Left Hand of
Darkness".....

Sound system:
Vl. stops           p t c k
Vd. prenas. stops   mb nd nj Ng("ng")  medial only
Vl. fricatives      f  s   sh   x ("h")
Nasals              m n ñ  (N in final pos. only, written "-ñ")
Semivow/resonants  v  r l   y
Vowels              i e a u o
In final position p t k, m n ñ, r l s
Morpheme structure:  (C)V(C), (C)V(C)V(C); longer forms are inflections,
derivations, or compounds.  The only permitted cluster is stop + r.
Resemblance to Malay structure is not accidental, tho it sounds very
un-Malay, with all those sh's.
My W.Eur. bias comes out in the morphology:  2 genders for nouns, anim. and
neut, 4 cases Nom, Gen. Dat. Acc.  Verbs (include adjectives) have Pres,
Past, Fut (very simple suffixes), 3 persons sing. & pl., a rudimentary
perfect, a rarely-used infinitive/gerund; no real participles, and no passive
voice.  Alot of the morphology can get lost in colloquial usage, where the
language approaches the simplicity of Malay.
Main morphophonemics to note: "Hardening", whereby nasal+fric > stop, nasal +
stop or nasal+nasal > Nasalized stop.  And many Cons+r combos result from
metathesis, as in "amakrale" < /amar+kale/.
I inadvertently omitted the verbal person markers in the translations; for
the verse that's OK, as it turns out.  The Biblical verse should probably
have started "Ende e parahambesa yakotasa...."-- the second Honorific prefix
wasn't really necessary.
Modifiers follow nouns, but numbers precede.  Basic S structure SV(IO)O, tho
the IO and O clitics precede the V, as in Spanish.

There's a more extensive translation:  English original at
<www.onelist.com/community/langmakercafe> digest 69, 12/26/99, my trans. at
<www.onelist.com/community/langmaker2> digest 201, 12/31. warning, it has
lots of s-hacek š.  Written more as pronounced, no gram. analysis.

There's a basic sketch of their history written down, more still in my head,
so that will have to wait for another time and place.  But they are not
primitives, nor particularly exotic.  The other species, called Gwr, too
clever for their own good, had a nuclear war about 1000 years ago.

Years ago I heard someone say "Yes of course there's life on other
planets....where they get up in the morning, take the bus to work....."
That's sort of how I see it.