Re: Terkunan: rules for deriving nouns, verbs, adjectives

On Oct 29, 2007, at 6:31 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Mr Veoler writes:
>> ...
>> I have been following this thread, and I don't really understand
>> the topics
>> involved, but this is just a thought:
>> What if Terkunan is a naturally evolved language (through GMP AFAWK),
>> with a constructed auxlang as its ancestor (in the time of Vulgar
>> Latin)?
>
> An interesting idea.  Why not?  It would solve many problems in this
> discussion.
>
> I will consider this and check whether it can be made a consistent
> explanation for what I have.  Thanks! :-)
>
> **Henrik
If nothing else, we need to accept that it's necessary to extend a
certain amount of "conliguistic license" to the creator of a
language. Jörg has explained that vowel harmony developed in Old
Albic when the vowels "became autosegmental". AFAIK he has never
explained just *how* that shift happened. I'd like to know, but I
don't think not knowing counts against his conlang.

Regarding Romance conlangs, in my experience anyway, it's customary
to start out with most of your nouns derived from what was originally
the VL accusative. Why? I don't know -- I'm sure that in the real
world there was some good reason for the accusative to be
generalized, but I don't know what it is; nor do I think it's all
that interesting to the story of the conlang. (Yes, I understand that
that's a little different in that it's a change that actually
happened in the real world).

Also, there is at least one Romance conlang I know of that doesn't
use a GMP at all, and I don't see anyone bashing it.

Furthermore, AFAIK sound changes do sometimes depend on morphology;
and they are not always completely regular. Likewise, contemporary
linguistics cannot always find the exact mechanism of how certain
morphological and syntactic changes happened. Henrik's conlinguistic
license allows him to put the changes from inflecting to isolating
into a "black box" -- which, on the one hand, he might find an
explanation for, but on the other hand might not -- or might not
choose to share it.