Re: Operation Infinite Vocabulary

From: "Tristan" <kesuari@...>

| Well, I think you could just take something like what Ygyde does.
| Without the limitations of being incredibly easy to pronounce by the
| handful of people who distinguish /I/ and /i/, and the limitations in
| the amounts of possible roots (I'm assuming you allow multisyllabic
| roots), it'd probably not be a bad idea with compounding.

Well Dragon is multisyllabic and has a simple vowel structure: the same short,
long and diphthongal vowels as Common Semitic as preserved in Arabic. I might
throw in short and long /e/ and /o/ for word roots, which will always be the
first syllable since all bound morphemes are suffixed. Words can get quite long,
along the lines of Malayalam, so there would be a need to make word compounding
and complexity more efficient. A fully marked-verb can stretch a couple pages...
actually a dozen syllables or more.

I forgot what that frequent vowel <y> Ygyde represented; wasn't it a schwa?

| Well, by Jove, that doesn't sound like a nice thing to do at all. I
| revoke my help; I shan't be helping any species that intends to anything
| like that. (And my next question is how do you enslave a bird? It seems
| to me that all they're good for is laying eggs, producing meat, and
| going from one place to another.) If you don't mind, I think I'll steal
| your language and Widserise it some so that the Dragons can't remember
| communicate any more, and fail miserably in their plot.

Yeah, my sci-fi/fantasy world isn't all joyous. Dragons and Elves can both be
evil in fact; Dragons just happen to be out for revenge for their reptilian
brethren's extinction. Of course they all have free will so they can choose
their way.

And true, birds don't make good servants. I should've said that they'll either
destroy or enslave mammals, which they consider aliens and mutants. They
especially wanna get rid of those pesky Tech Elves, who are at least trying to
make peace between the rival races.

Birds might be trained to fight against mammals and humans, though.

I still want an Orcish language (or whatever you'd call a revived/cloned
Neanderthal-type early human); they're really not evil though they look like it
and they're pretty "savage" in terms of cultural advancement. It will be a very
basic language, possibly a minimalist IAL-type.

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