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Re: CHAT: A sample of my newborn conlang

From:Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>
Date:Friday, January 25, 2002, 20:47
Hi Stephen,

> Gurbh maith agat agus thank'ee kindly. I did have quite a bit of trouble > with the orthography. Especially since there are four 'phonetic tricks' > used for grammatical reasons - urú (eclipsis), seimhiú (lenition, I > think; e.g. /p/->/f/), and for vowels a sort of i-affection and someting > related which for the moment I'm just calling 'vowel-grading'
What is the last one about?
> If there were any examples of eclipsis in the sentence, you'd see the > resembelance with Irish better - for example the eclipsed form of > 'caera' is written 'gcaera', (pronounced just as /g.ar4A/) rather than > 'gaera'. I guess the second way would the Brythonic orthography, and the > first looks horrifically ugly to Brythonicers ;). Of course this leads to > trouble with digraphs - e.g. <th> for /T/ - should I write it's eclipsed > form as <dth>, <dhth> (uurgh) or just give in and do <dh>? I opted for > the first, thought it still causes problems with some letters. Similar > problem with the lenition. The vowel progressions don't record their point > of origin however ;).
What are the vowel progressions?
> > I guess it's the <y>s (/y/) which give it the Welsh look, not sure where > the Xhosa comes from (how would I? I don't know what Xhosa looks like ;) - > I'll google for it next time I'm online).
LOL. Neither do I know what it looks like :-) Still, it has a weird look :-)
> > (BTW in the transliteration at least this looks very much like Tolwd
:-))
> > You mean, it seems to sound similar?
I don't know, I am uncomofortable with Irish orthography, so I couldn't read it :-) But as a point of visioaesthetics (is this a valid English word?) they do look similar - I use a regular stop + h = spirant scheme, so Tolwd has lots of bh's, th's, dh'and the like
> > > Yes, it works in Welsh (though in modern only): > > Only in ModW? That's a curious thing - I would have supposed that such > things go back to the common ancestor of both Brythonic & Goidelic > tongues. An innovation?
Perhaps. In the literary language, and in the modern written standard , it is not good style.
> > The only possessive to trigger the nasal mutation is "fy" [v@] (my). So
in
> > the modern language it is omitted before words the radicals of which can
be
> > nasally mutated, and simply the mutation is applied: > > Is there an error in this sentence? Does it make the right sense if I > replace "can be" with "can't be" ? (I still wouldn't be sure what "and > simply the mutation is applied means" - how many kind of mutation are
there
> in Welsh? 'nasal mutation' (/b/,/v/ > /m/, but also /p/,/f/ > /m/ ??) > and something else?)
The Welsh nasal mutation turns unvoiced stops into homorganic aspirated/unvoiced nasals, and voiced stops into homorganic nasals: p > mh, t > nh c > ngh b > m d > n g > ng [N] The point is: If the word's radical is a stop, the mutation is applied and the "fy" is omitted. If the word's radical is a spirant, or a nasal, or a lateral, the "fy" is used (or, after a vowel, 'n) There are three mutations in Welsh.
> > "my brother" is usually _mrawd_ (<brawd), but > > "my sister" is "fy chwaer", because ch- is not susceptible to nasal > > mutation. > > Interesting; in my lang and in Irish, 'nasal' mutation is part of what's > called eclipsis: /p/ > /b/ > /m/ and /f/ > /v/ > /m/. I suppose you should > only really call the first part eclipsis
In Welsh, only the first is the nasal mutation. The second does not exist. Bye, Pavel

Replies

M.E.S. <suomenkieli@...>"Hi! This is me!" jpg from M.E.S. (Matt)
Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>