Re: CHAT: False friends - echos from the mother tounge

Staving Steven Williams:
>Harald Stoiber hat geschrieben:
>
> > What would you do in the following case? Let us say,
> > you have a root "sat" and an inflectional
> > ending "an"... would you avoid the remaining
> > "satan"? Just a question. Are you trying to avoid
> > inclusion of negative or unpleasant terms of your
> > mother tounge into your conlang?
>
>Well, German has a whole slew of words that sound like
>English curse words. 'Fach' [fax] and 'Damm' [dam] are
>the only ones I can think of right off hand, but you
>get the idea. If I avoided those words in German, I
>have every right to avoid words like that in my
>conlang, but since I use 'Fach' and 'Damm' freely,
>even when monolingual English-speakers are around, I
>have no reason to avoid them in conlang.
>
>Then again, words like that never show up in my
>conlang. [x] can't appear at the end of a word, and
>[m] is rare. I'm pretty sure I have [fak] somewhere in
>my conlang, though, and if not, then it's time to add
>it to my dictionary. Just for laughs, you see.
>
I've just been compiling verb tables for Magikimnaz, a first generation
descendent of Khangaþyagon. Khangaþyagon is agglutinating, and has the
following verbal affixes.

i 3p
fœ perfect
kh  [x] future

so third person future perfect comes out as ifœkh. Given that [x] -> [k] in
the evolution of Magikimnas, that I was evolving an agglutinating language
into an inflecting one, and that I had decided that nearby vowels would
influence each other as the affixes reduced, guess what I spent a lot of
time trying to avoid the 3rd person future present becoming?

By the way, it eventually ended up as vwik.

Pete