Re: Maggel

En réponse à Sally Caves :

>I, too, would love to see a website for Maggel if ever Christophe could get
>to it, and his reasons for not getting to it I completely understand,
>because Real Life (TM) seems to be bogging me down too.
I hope I will, one day. Maybe after I made a METAFONT for Maggel ;) .

>   The Teonaht grammar
>as it is up-Web, so to speak, is disastrously incomplete; I'm making new
>additions down-Web to it all the time and not modifying the sites.  For one
>thing, I downloaded Smart FTP, and haven't quite got the hang of it yet.
>Does anybody have that?  I'm having to reestablish all my old software,
>since the old downloads went the way of the old computer.
I don't have Smart FTP. I personally use EFTP (http://www.eftp.org) which I 
find extremely intuitive.
_______________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Christian Thalmann :


> > |maggel|
> > (the Maggel alphabet doesn't feature capitals) is regularly pronounced
> > [m@'gE:l].
>
>How boringly sensible.  ;-)
Hehe :P


> > If you want an irregular noun, take rather |imuohf|: cow. It's
> > pronounced ['mbu:]. Don't even try to analyse the word's
>orthography, it's
> > completely off the pronunciation. And it's not the worse example ;)
>
>Then its plural form is probably |imuohfi|, pronounced
>[mE~_kw].  ;-)))
LOL. Actually, it's more complicated than that. |imuohf| *is* the plural 
form (well, the indefinite plural form at least). It's because it's a 
feminine noun, and for feminine nouns the base form is the indefinite 
plural :) . Then Maggel nouns have 4 numbers, so we miss three :) . Those are:
- the singular: imuofd ['mbag] (believe it or not, this form is actually 
*more* regular than the previous one, according to Maggel spelling rules ;) .
- the dual: imus ['mbuz].
- the definite plural: imhuo ['mb_juO].

Note that the definite plural indicates that the amount is known, but not 
that the noun is definite (this is marked by the definite article |a(n)|, 
at least when the noun is not completed by an adjective, a relative clause 
or another noun ;) ).
_______________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Tristan Mc Leay :


>Oh, why not? It seems pretty straight-forward: [u], especially before a
>vowel, and [b] have much in common,
Except that it doesn't fit anymore when you check the other forms of the 
noun (especially the definite plural ;)) ).

>  as do [f] and [w] (and we all know
>how trivial [ow]=>[u] is). It seems pretty trivial to me :)
Except that it isn't ;))

>The silent i- is the only thing that disturbs me, and that only slightly :)
Actually, the initial i is close to make sense. You see, the sequence |im| 
is regularly pronounced [p] or [mp]. I guess [mb] is just a bit irregular :) .
_______________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Carsten Becker :


>What's declarative, comibned and distributive? It's just because I
>haven't got numbers yet. Also, I'm always open for trying new concepts,
>that's mainly why I'm conlanging.
Actually, it's pretty simple:
- declarative numbers are just that: numbers as they are "declared". 
Basically, when you say "the number one", that's the declarative form.
- combined numbers combine (but that's not the reason for the name ;) ) 
cardinals, ordinals and multiplicative adverbs. They are called "combined" 
because they are usually combined with a noun (but not always).
- distributive numbers are something I stole from Latin :) . They mean "one 
by one", "two by two", etc... or "each one", "each two", etc...

Note that Maggel has number only up to 7999 (it has a base-20 system). At 
8000 and above, Maggel uses nouns instead, which have a completely 
different behaviour from numbers. You can imagine the mess when you want to 
say "20000 leagues under the sea" ;))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

Replies