Grie Ka #1 (was Re: ,Language' in language name?)

From: "Adam Walker" <dreamertwo@...>

> >     Zeha ordelain Ka friutomyeucu ranef!
> >         (Why don't we speak Ka on as many occasions as possible!)
> >
> >Hiro
>
> Well, so far Ka looks pretty un-Japanese to me.  Your phonotactics don't
> look even faintly Japanese.  And the word order is un-Japanese too. How
> about some examples of yuor lexicon.  I'm always interesed in the weirdest
> lexemes in everyone's langs.
Oh, you asked for it!!
Let me try to sketch how words are constructed in Ka.

When I started the project, I really wanted my conlang to be a
"philosophical" one, which means it should have fairly systematic
word-constructing methodology. Words being constructed systematically, words
with similar meanings or words in the same category should have similar
forms and sounds.

On the other hand, it is among a similar meaning word group that is often
used in contrast and has to be distinguished most in forms and sounds..

My conclusion was I have to seek balance between these two opposite driving
forces.

So I looked around at real world examples, and found Chinese ideograms
(Kanji) were doing a really good job. Most Kanji characters have two parts,
one resents the sound and the 'flavour' of the meaning of the character, and
the other represents its category.

I tried to mimic this principle of Kanji and I decided the basic structure
of word in Ka as the combination of two parts: the former part suggests
vague meaning of the word, and the latter part defines the category it
belongs. For example,

    fixpul     fix   + pul    breakfast  ( ix = long i )
    haripul   hari + pul    lunch
    sompul   som + pul    supper

This level of similarity among related words is not at all unusual. In fact,
in Japanese,

    chooshok    breakfast
    chuushok    lunch
    yuushok      supper

And in Ka, this construction is used more universally (or at least as much
as I can)

You may ask, why 'category' part is the latter, not the former. There are
two reasons.

The first reason is (this is just my instinct) that psychologically words
are more distinguishable if they have endings common. Please compare the
example above to the following case.

    pulfix
    pulhari
    pulsom

Which case is more distinguishable to you? ( Same? )  I think it is more
true when they are read loud.

The second reason is in Ka, words in the same category heve the same
'inflection' pattern. For example, -pul has following 'inflections':

    haripul       act of having lunch
    hariplyef     cuisine served as lunch
    hariplesn    food served as lunch
    haripil        person having lunch
    hariplkel     person having lunch with
    etc.

The point is once you got this inflection, you can also apply it to 'fixpul'
or 'sompul'  or any other word as long as it shares the same ending '-pul'.

That's all for today !
Questions and comments are welcome !
Please wait until I manage to post 'Grie Ka #2.'
(I'm planning to do it as series.)

Hiro