Re: How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")

On Feb 22, 2007, at 11:05 PM, Jeff Rollin wrote:

> I'm trying to get rid of pronouns; does anyone know of a language
> which uses
> no pronouns (not even nouns instead of pronouns, like Japanese) at
> all?
Pirahã seems to have recently borrowed all of its pronouns from
Nheengatu. I haven't seen anything yet hypothesizing whether they had
their own pronouns before that, or how they otherwise referred to
people and things. One idea worth considering, I think, is using
locatives like "here:there:over there"... but if you use those, they
will become de facto pronouns, which kind of defeats the point of not
using pronouns in the first place.

[...]
> Gender/noun-class: I'm trying to move beyond the traditional
> masculine/feminine(/neuter) gender distinction into a Bantu-inspired
> noun-class system for things like professionals, one for languages,
> and one
> for inhabitants ( e.g. as if one said "the wise-r bak-er", "the
> passionate-an Itali-an", "broken-ish Engl-ish". Has anyone designed a
> language like this? What do you do about the alternation between
> roots/suffixes ending/beginning in a consonant or a vowel?
What about the alternation? As I read it, your language doesn't have
a restriction against medial CC; does it have one against VV?
Otherwise, I don't see this as a problem (although it might make for
some interesting sandhi).

[...]
> 5. Palatalised consonants, even in the face of words like "atja" /
> atja/
> (bird) are easy, since the Roman alphabet has both j and y, which
> can be
> used for either palatalisation or a [j] phoneme, and "j" is not
> used for
> anything else (such as Z, the "s" in "pleasure"). However,
> combinations such
> as "nyk" and even "nyj" are ugly and are apt to be pronounced by
> English
> speakers as "nick" and "nidge" anyway - any thoughts? (Perhaps
> palatalised
> consonants in clusters (and at the end of words) should be denoted
> by -j-
> instead of -y-?)
You could use an apostrophe, if you're not opposed to punctuation.

> 6. Labialised and aspirated consonants also present a problem,
> since the
> language can have both aspirated "t" and "t" followed by "h" (and
> other
> combinations), and the Roman alphabet has no variations on h or w
> analogous
> to the j/y split. Any suggestions? (Maybe I could make a rule that,
> say,
> "lh" represents aspirated /lh/ and that an /l/ followed by a
> ("full") /h/ =>
> "lk"?)
<lk> for /lh/ seems a little strange, IMO. Does the sequence /lk/ not
occur?

On Feb 22, 2007, at 11:05 PM, Jeff Rollin wrote:
> PS As an aside: I've talked about palatalised, prenasalised,
> labialised, and
> aspirated consonants; Wikipedia reports that there are also
> languages which
> have post-nasalised (bn) and pre- and post-stopped nasals (pn, mp).
> I'm not
> aware of any language that uses pre-palatalised or pre-labialised
> consonants. Anyone?
Palatalization and labialization, as I understand it, are usually to
be understood as occurring *simultaneous* to whatever other gestures
a consonant involves; however, I believe I have heard of
prepalatalization vs. postpalatalization (but I don't have any
sources to cite). In any case, I use prepalatalization in a conlang,
although in later forms of that language it shifts to regular
palatalization.

I believe there are probably phonetic reasons nasalization differs
from e.g. labialization and palatalization, in that in occurs before
or after consonants, but not necessarily simultaneously with them;
someone who has actually studied phonetics should correct me, but I
think that if you pronounce e.g. a [b]-like phone with simultaneous
nasalization, the result is [m], not a prenasalized [b] (which I am
unsure how to show in XSAMPA).

> Also, are there any languages that use pre-fricativized
> consonants?
>
> I.e., given a language in which "pam" could be a word, but not "pram"
> (because of a restriction on consonant clusters in initial
> position) are
> languages any words in which "spam" could be a word, despite the
> aforementioned restriction, due to pre-fricativized consonants?
As I understand it, Gaelic has sequences of fricative+stop which (I
think) can be considered as single units, at least orthographically;
I am not sure about whether they are so phonologically or
phonetically. They are homorganic, though, so [st] could occur, but
not [sp].

You might also want to consider preaspiration, especially since you
like Finnish anyway.

Replies