Re: CHAT: A sample of my newborn conlang

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

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