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Kowei, tonal Indo-European language

From:E-Ching Ng <e-ching.ng@...>
Date:Saturday, January 13, 2001, 4:28
By the way, I never told everyone what became of my tonal Indo-European language
project. Thank you all for answering those questions when I first joined the
list. I am particularly indebted to whoever used the word "tonogenesis",
because otherwise I would never have figured out the right keyword for my
research.

I've temporarily posted the description of Kowei (ko is 'human' in my conlang, wei
is Fujian dialect for "language") at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~en27/kowei.doc .
I may not republish, but I would very much like to hear what people think of
the way I finally scrambled towards tonogenesis and re-introduction of voiced
stops.

It is my first conlang, and it was thrown together in a few weeks for a not
exactly rigorous class, so please don't expect proper research (the Lamsek
villages are a fiction, and I have no idea what southwestern Fujian dialect
sounds like). Basically this was an experiment in creating an Indo-European
language with phonology like a southern Chinese dialect and grammar from
nowhere. Once I managed that I'm afraid I ran out of energy for inventing
further interesting developments, except for a Great Diphthong Shift.

Note: We were required to cite IE cognates of our conlang words, and some of these
might not display right, since I use special fonts (Old English at
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/ and IPA at
http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html ). This isn't terribly
important - the modern language itself is, I think, written in plain vanilla
ASCII.

Thanks all!
E-Ching