Re: From The Ashes...

Well, with the new year and all, I've come back, and I'm redoing everything.
  Pursuing my projects (conlang or otherwise) from a new angle, from the
ground up.

My new homepage is:

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Hall/5517/dannyboy.html

I hope to put up all my brain stuff, including Tech and Quaelitz (which will
be my only two projects for now).

Quaelitz has been raised from the dead -- but now it's based on Sumerian.
The situation is that these people are the modern-day descendants of ancient
(as in well over 10,000 B.C.) Mesopotamian Elves who later adopted Sumerian,
more or less.  But a huge mass of Semitic in the form of Akkadian, then
Aramaic, then Arabic would bleed into the language (not to mention Persian,
given that the modern elves are scattered from Iran to northern
India/Pakistan to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.  The ethnic group is still
called "Quaelitistan" (in Farsi, _qalitestaan_; in Turkish, _Kelitistan_).
The origin of the name is unknown; I gotta look up in the Sumerian lexicon I
got printed out at home for native terms.  Quaelitz is of course
agglutinative, SOV, postpositional in most cases, active or maybe ergative,
and a pretty simple phonology, in all:

p  t  k  m  n  ng s  sh h  r  l  w  y  (?)
(allophones: b  d  g  z  zh; from voiceless counterparts)

The vowels are: a  e  i  u (last has o as an allophone)

The ethnotyping of the people are still that of a fair-skinned, black
haired, very dark eyes, tall and very attractive people -- the females are
believed by some locals to be earthly apparitions of houris, the fair
maidens of Islamic paradise.

About Tech: Got my phonology and a little of the grammar worked out.
FINALLY.  And by the way, Tech City and the whole island nation, which will
not declare their government, constitution, and single unified monarch until
1 January 2001, pulled out ALL the stops for the Millennium.  Man, it was
like Mardi Gras, Carnaval and Easter in Greece and Christmas in Russia all
rolled into one.  Though the traditional Ethiopian Orthodox Church which is
predominant uses a different calendar specific to Ethiopia-Eritrea, the
cosmopolitan nature of the young nation as well as influence from other
Christians (most are Catholics with smaller
Protestant/Evangelical/Pentecostal groups), the modern Gregorian calendar is
in popular use (as well as the Islamic calendar).  But regardless of
calendar, my ears are still ringing from the polyrhythmic symphony of
Afro-Caribbean percussion from timbales and agogos to steel drums, while New
Orleans-like brass, saxes and clarinets blared some really exciting tunes.
And these guys are geniuses with polytechnics; I'm not usually big on
fireworks (since they're all the same!)

Whoops, got into my fantasy world again.  But so far I'm using a simplified
version of the consonant inventory just to get to work on something.  The
full inventory is something like fifty and not even counting mutations and
'soft' and 'hard' oppositions, etc.  Tech Jr., as I call it, is written in
Arabic script (the language is officially in Ge'ez, but Arabic and Latin are
in very wide use).  33 consonants, 7 vowels.  I had to tinker with some of
the huruf of the Arabic abjad, especially with _thaa'_ (which becomes
_hla'_; you'll see).  The significance of 33 and 7 is related to Christ: his
33 years on earth, and the divine number 7; the total is 40 referring to 40
days of the Flood and of Jesus' wilderness retreat (and three temptations),
and 40 years for the Exodus.

Here are the 33 consonants and 7 vowels, listed with Arabic names and Tech
values:

'alif      ?  (forms long a)
baa'       b
paa'       p
taa'       t
thaa'      ls (voiceless lat. fric.; norm. written tl)
jeem       dZ
cheem      tS
hhaa'      h- (pharyngeal h)
khaa'      X (uvular, not velar)
daal       d
dhaal      lz (voiced lat. fric.; norm. written dl)
raa'       r (trilled)
zaay       z
zhaay      Z (foreign words only)
seen       s
sheen      S
ssaad      ts' (ejective, see seen)
ddaad      tS' (ejective, see cheem)
ttaa'      t' (ejective, see taa')
zzaa'      tl' (ejective, see tlaa')
`ayn       6  (voiced pharyngeal h, see hhah)
ghayn      R  (uvular fricative)
faa'       f
qaaf       q
vaa'       v  (foreign words only)
kaaf       k
gaaf       g
laam       l
meem       m
noon       n  (forms nasal vowels)
haa'       h  (forms aspirated vowels)
waaw       w  (forms long u)
yaa'       y  (forms long i)

fathha     @
damma      u
kassra     i
fathhataan a
dammataan  o
kassrataan e
sukoon     -  (insert i-, i bar, between difficult cons. clusters)

Be careful though -- features such as retroflexion, alveolarization, velar
nasals, voiceless nasals, and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on
an...  these are not indicated in the Arabic system, except for diacritics
which are not standardized as of yet (they should be by the end of this new
century).

So far I'm going to use Sanskrit's noun declensions, shared
Indo-European/Afro-Asiatic feminine marking -at > -ah and the neuter
-on/-en/-ma, genitives in -i, possessive suffixes as in Arabic, and some of
the elements of Kartvelian/Georgian verb polysynthesis.

Oh, and lookie here.  I got a word list.  I made all this conform to the 33
consonants and 7 vowels.  So here are a few -- and notice that some of these
have cognates and near-cognates in modern Nostratic-derived languages!

manga   monkey
shnu    snow
more    large body of water
m@lge   female breast
hhalb   white
pata    box, basket
6arku   sinew, bowstring
lonqa   to bend
ttapa   to hit (target)
bocha   young deer
buqa    cows  (the singular is probably buqun, the neuter)
poq     herd of cattle (pack)
qus@    nut
butt@   pistachio nut (slang: butt, rear end)
mola    to pound, crumble, crush, break up, gnaw, smash
khubz   bread, cereal flour
?omsa   meat
madu    honey
bur@    flint, knife, to cut/carve
ti?alo  pile of stones, mound, grave
?edin@  father
?@y@    mother
?aba    'daddy'
6ara    to burn, to use magic, to sacrifice
tlotta  to curse or bless
tul@    to tell a story, to invoke ritual texts/spells

Now it's your turn.

Danny
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