Romlang problem in Terkunan
From: | Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> |
Date: | Tuesday, August 7, 2007, 15:45 |
Hello!
A small problem arose concerning the sound shifts of Terkunan: I don't
like the sound of -/ls/ at the end of words but it frequently occurs
due to a regularised plural ending -/s/. Since the pronouns are
regular, too, I constantly see |ilz| /ils/ 'they'.
Any idea what to do about this? Terkunan is meant to be a typical
romlang, but there is no trace of an l > u shift and I don't want one,
because I don't like the diphthongs that will arise from that. There
are quite frequent r <> l switches, however, but currently, the
language tends towards -l at ends of words (e.g. arbul 'tree'). For
polysyllabic words, anyway. I thought about having -l > -r in
monosyllabics and switching the overall tendencies for l/r. It would
affect a lot of things:
(Current words are given in parens:)
ILLE > (il) ir 'he,she,it' => irz 'they'
CAELUM > (kel) ker 'heaven,sky' => kerz 'heavens, skies'
SOL > (sul) sur 'sun'
MILLE > (mil) mir 'thousand'
NULLUM > (nul) nur 'zero'
MALUM > (mal) mar 'bad' == mar 'ocean'
And also:
ARBOREM > (arbul) albur 'tree'
MANTELUM > (mantil) mantir 'cape, cloak'
Maybe even (less likely due to mixed original distribution of l and r):
BOREALEM > (boral) bolar 'northern'
I am not really content with this, especially the monosyllabics are
not what I dream of.
What other shifts of -l would be feasible? Any ideas? Could I
handle -/ls/ specially? The -/l/ itself I find quite nice.
**Henrik
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