Re: Group Conlang (was: Re: a Conlang, created by the group?)

Herman Miller wrote:

>>>I don't especially like pe- or ys-.
>>Neither do I. Do you not like them or plainly hate them?
>
>I could get used to them, I guess, but pe- sounds too much like "patient"
>and I'm not yet sure about how the syllables ending in fricatives are going
>to work as prefixes.
pe- is precisely from "patient" (I didn't think much, I just needed it
for an example.)
The fricative endings are not a problem. If you have ys-, you say

ys- + frar- = ysfrar-
ys- + ik-   = ysik-

You might also have

ys- + bal- = yzbal-  (voice harmony)
I'm not saying anyone will have difficulty pronouncing -sb-, just
that the voice distinction should not apply there... You can write
ysbal- if you want to. But you'll probably inadvertedly change s > z
before a voiced consonant.


>>Bear in mind that kjak- "bite" should be marked with a
>>predicate case affix. Otherwise your sentence could mean
>>"the bit made to me by the dog", cos kjak- is both
>>nominal and verbal in principle. The proposed word order
>>(modifiers + head) suggests this.
>
>If we get rid of verb roots, it should have a predicate case affix. I'm
>still not convinced that getting rid of verb roots is a good idea. I'd
>prefer to derive the noun "bite" from the verb "to bite".
As Carlos explained, we'll just not be making a difference between
verb and noun roots. But some roots will have "default" verbal
meaning, and some "default" nominal meaning (or adjectival meaning).
I mean, if you see kjak- without any case tags, you could doubt
whether it's a noun or a verb ("bite"), but for frar- "dog" there's
no reasonable "verbal" meaning. For "kill", you could doubt whether
its nominal usage means "a killing" or "a killer" or sthg else.

In my opinion we should create the words and specify which possible
meanings it'll have. For default verbal roots such as "kill", you
should specify if you mean something different from "act of killing".

Mathias has posted a long message about the problems arising from
deriving noun > verb and viceversa.

"to sit" > "the act of sitting"

BUT

"a seat" > "to sit"

This may cause a problem, but let us think more about it.
"To sit" is a physical action that we can visualize.
"A seat" is an empty space that may be used to sit on.

IMHO "to sit" is more intuitive than "a seat" when it comes to
make a root. Now "a chair" is something different: it's a physical
object, so the root should be more nominal here. The verbal meaning
would be "to sit down on a chair".

What I mean is: let's use our common sense and decide whether
a root is more verbal or more nominal. We're trying to create a
seemingly natural language here. Things should be a bit mixed.


--Pablo Flores

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