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Re: New Language - Ñullyu

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Friday, March 4, 2005, 23:42
Joe Fatula wrote:
> Thanks again to all the people who helped proofread my other two language > pages.
Hmm, I meant to but never got to it......
> > Here's another one, a bit different than the first two. The page isn't > complete, of course, but I hope you enjoy it. > > http://mechanorium.tripod.com/artlang/nullyu.html > > If anyone could help me with proofreading this one, that'd be great.
Clerk RM finds no typos, nor even awkward phrasings. +imprimatur+ I think your vowel chart might be arranged a little differently; /y/ and /ö/ ought to be moved so as to be more clearly _front_; and perhaps you need a category "Central" for /î/ and /â/ (and maybe plain /a/?). The status of /û/ isn't clear-- is it meant to be rounded counterpart of /î/?? Or it could be, in view of vowel harmony, that a simple front/back + round/unround would do it. More questions as I look at it: is /î/ meant to be unrounded counterpart of /u/? or is that /û/? If the latter, is /î/ simply a high central V that stands alone in the system? That I could see. Is /â/ [3] unrounded counterpart of /o/ perhaps? This makes the most sense to me (pairs arranged unround/round): FRONT hi i y CENTRAL î BACK û u mid e ö â o lo ä a But I suspect the coming explanation of the harmony system will clarify things. ---------------------------------------------- It's probably still "to do", but I'd like to see some examples under the "passive" heading.
> And I give a whole discussion of valency here, since it's rather important > in this language, but I'm really not an expert. Am I explaining this the > right way at all?
Seems OK to me; but for variable verbs like "eat", I was expecting to see some sort of dummy object suffix required, rather the change to 1-valency. Something like (based on one of my Indo. langs)-- yau uan ase yau u-an asa-e I I-eat mango-def "I ate the mango" vs. yau uano I I-eat-"obj." = either 'I'm eating' or 'I ate it/something' (never *yau uan) (at least I think that's how it works :-)) )