Re: New Language: Ano~'him (ACTUAL) Vair long

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 05:15:58PM -0700, bob thornton wrote:
[...]
> Vowel contour? I do not understand. I am still a noobie here.
Well, "vowel contour" is my coined terminology for describing what
happens with Ebisédian nouns in their various cases. It's sorta like
the German ablaut, except that it affects multiple syllables at a
time. Example:

	k0'rumi	["kAr`umi]	- "color", locative
	ko'rum0	["kor`umA]	- "color", originative
	k0'romu	["kAr`omu]	- "color", receptive
	ka'rwma	["kar`u"ma]	- "color", instrumental
	ka'rwm3	["kar`u"m@\]	- "color", conveyant

Note how the internal vowels shift in each noun case. In particular,
in the originative the non-final low vowels become mid vowels, whereas
in the receptive the non-final high vowels become mid vowels. The
pattern is high-to-low for the originative and low-to-high for the
receptive. That's what I mean by vowel contour.


[...]
> > Cool. I may adapt this idea for Tatari Faran, which doesn't yet
> > have 3rd person pronouns. :-)
>
>
> I, personally, stole it from Latin. But you didn't read that, now
> did you? ^_^
:-) Although, what I ended up doing last night was to make 3rd person
pronouns half-breed demonstratives. I might post the details later if
I don't go over my quota answering posts that I wanted to answer
yesterday but which were already past yesterday's limit.

[...]
> >Hmm. Voicing the last consonant gives final /d/ vs. final /t/. That
> seems to be a pretty difficult distinction to pronounce, IME, esp. if
> you have no audible release after the consonant. (I know this 'cos
> some Ebis?dian pronouns have this problem in the nullar, which made me
> give them irregular forms.)
>
>
> Eh, not a good thing, that. Perhaps I should transform them into a
> voiced dental fricative? Hee, I love the word 'fricative'. Herm.
> Right.
You mean [D]? Sure, that'd be contrastive enough I think. :-)


[...]
> >Interesting. So if you wanted say "he builds the table" you'll have to
> say "he does the building of the table"?
>
>
> How I had invisioned it was "He do build the table" or the like. But
> less pidgin sounding.
Right.


[...]
> > There are also 'complicated' tenses: constant, finished action,
> > gerund, abiliative (can do) desirative (want to), imperative (have
> > to) and infinitive. They are suffixed onto the verb.
>
> >Nice. I think I should have this in Tatari Faran, instead of using
> auxiliaries like English.
>
>
> I always like langs that do that. Auxiliaries bother me.
Yeah, I think auxiliaries are a patchwork for a broken system. ;-)


[...]
> > The four moods are statement, interrogative, command, and refutive.
> > These are represented by tones. High tone is statement, low tone is
> > interrogative, rising tone is command, falling is refutative.
>
> >Refutative?
>
> For lack of a better term. It's a negative reply to a question. I
> know that's rather unwieldly, but I like it.
I thought that should simply be "negative"?


[...]
> >Sounds like a very interesting conlang. If I understood you right,
> there are only 3 verbs in the language, and to form other verbs you
> compound them with, say, a gerund or something? I like this minimal
> verb idea. :-)
>
> With minimal verbs, one can get much more creative with their nouns. ^_^
[...]

So in your example "he do build the table", what is "build"? A gerund?
A participle? A noun?


T

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