Re: New Language - Ñullyu

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 :-))  )