Re: Love Those Double Vowels (was: Diving In...)

In a message dated 11/3/01 10:29:39 AM, suomenkieli@YAHOO.COM writes:

>In Vyh, I'm creating a "vowel harmony" system -- and
>I've noticed that, due to the creator's own dis/likes,
>there tend to exist doubles of the same vowel that
>rival each other.  For instance, the Vya:a:hns like
>/&/ sound (and love /&:/) but disliked its
>counter-part -- rival, if you will -- /a/ (and detest
>the sound /a:/).  Or, the vowel _yy_ /Y:/ has a rival
>vowel _uu_ /u:/, so you often see positive-meaning
>words with such vowels like _a:_ or _yy_ or _L_ and
>negative-meaning words with their rival vowels like
>_a_ or _uu_ or _i_.
Wow, that's just like Eloshtan! Front vowels tend to be in positive words and
back vowels in negative ones, with lots of exceptions and arbitrarity of
course. There are five vowels, a e i o u /A E I V U/. "e" "rivals" "o", and
"i" rivals "a" or "u". The reason for "i" having two opposite vowels is that
(oversimplifying slightly) in the parent language, Uvrion, "i" was opposite
"u" and there was another vowel, "æ", that was opposite "u" - but "æ" merged
with "i", so now if you want to know the opposite word of one with "i" you
don't know if it will have "a" or "u".

Here are a few examples:
e = good
o = evil
eve = true
ovo = false
imipe = permanent
umapo = temporary

(I read something once about a similar thing happening in English, with words
like "little" "itty-bitty" "tiny" (originally pronounced with a front vowel)
"teeny" (brough back to a front vowel!), vs. "large" "humongous" "grand" and
"mammoth" (now pronounced with a /&/ or something like it [in most {?}
dialects] but presumably it used to be /A/). Of course there are those pesky
exceptions "big" and "small" :-)  )

This phonetic-semantic relationship combined with vowel harmony to lead to
another phenomenon in Eloshtan:
Certain independent words came to be used also as derivation suffixes. For
example, the word "pcefy" means "to have/experience". Eventually it came to
be used as a suffix - "yeglepcefy" means "to have wisdom," or "be wise." Due
to vowel harmony, if you want to attach this suffix to a back-vowel word, you
have to change the vowels to their back-vowel counterparts. To attach "pcefy"
to the word "yoglo" (stupidity), you have to change it to "pcofy," and you
get the word "yoglopcofy" (to be stupid). Once this started happening, there
were two versions of every suffixed verb. The new versions soon started
getting detached again, and you wound up with both "pcefy" and "pcofy" as
independent words. Both mean exactly the same thing, except the first is used
when you look upon the "having/experiencing" in a positive light, and the
second when you see it in a negative light. (This only applies when the words
are used independently, not as suffixes - saying "vatotoct" (s/he built a
house) does not mean you look upon it unfavorably, since the ONLY way to use
the verb as a suffix is if you use the back-vowel version - you can't say
*"vatotect" as one word.)

This is why, in the Babel story translation, you get the people saying
"mactolono ... teglenemken," "let's build a tower..." (the "tegle" in there
means build), but then you get God going down to see the tower
"toglackuqkov," "that they built" ("togla" also means build). The people are
happy about their building, but God isn't, so they use different verbs.

>Hyyva:voaazenoxdjoo!
>Matt33
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html

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