Re: Crazy Ideas, Part 1

This sounds a lot more fun than Interlingua, but I'll leave this project to
those who know Latin.  ;-)

Jim




----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2000 3:41 PM
Subject: Crazy Ideas, Part 1


I was very pleased to find that Encyclopædia Brittanica is now online!  That
brought the library a lot closer to home, and you can't go wrong with
Brittanca.

I was researching Nostratic, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Altaic.  Then I
came up with a form of Latin that borrowed Turkish's agglutinative system.
The
first idea was a unified present indicative active conjugation of verbs:

amo "I love"
ama "thou lovest"
ame "he/she/it loves"

Yup, the final vowel determines person.  To form the plural, just add an
all-purpose plural marker:

amos "we love"
amas "you love"
ames "they love"

Nouns are pluralized with the -s (or -es) suffix: can "dog" > canes "dogs",
fel
"cat" > feles "cats", equo "horse" > equos "horses", hom "man" > homes
"men".

Masculine nouns end in a consonant or -o.  To feminize the noun, add -a (or
replace -o with -a).  Neuters add -o, but since masculines can end in -o as
well, that leaves no distinction of masculines and neuters.  If a noun ends
in
a semivocalic -i- before the masculine marker -o, the neuter is formed
with -e,
not -o; -a is still used for feminines.

Case formation is suffixal and usually based on Proto-Indo-European case
markers:

Nominative: zero ending (i.e. noun ends in a consonant, -(i)o, -(i)a, or -ie
Vocative: -e added to consonant stem (masculine); otherwise same as
nominative
Accusative: -(e)n [acc. plural: -(e)n(e)s]
Genitive: -i
Dative/Locative: -ei for consonant stems, -i for vowel stems
Ablative/Instrumental: -(e)bi

Other secondary cases are formed with the former prepositions: elative -(e)c
(from "ex"), illative -in (from "in"), etc.

Anybody who wants to take up the project may do so.  I'm just posting ideas
for
various conlangs, and giving you the chance to do the work and claim the
product for yourselves; I ask for no credit unless you insist.

Good luck!

DaW.  ¶¦¬þ

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