Re: Indic loans in Euir Twas (was:Re: [CONLANG] Attention Roger! Sanskrit loans in Javanese etc.)

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:40:11 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:

>Thing is I've decided that the traditional Indic-
>derived writing system (Lipiir) of my conlang Euir
>Twas has a set of rather original correspondences
>between Indic letters and Lipiir sound values:
I like.  The Welsh effect on the Indic vowels is particularly nice.

I had to draw a table of all the consonants to see what was going on,
though.  Were the consonants not in your list meant to be not used in
Lipiir, or used with their canonical values?

>[s`] > [x] is well documented in
>various languages. Indoaryan itself has cases of
>| /s`/ > /k_h/ e.g. /s\Is`j@/ > Panjabi /sIk_h/
What about [s\]?  I'd be surprised if [s\] stayed in place while [s`] jumped
over it to become [x].  IIRC they merge in modern Indic (nearly?)
everywhere, but you didn't mention the fate of [s\].

>The natural follow-up was that Euir
>has an old layer of Indic loans with these
>correspondences and a younger layer with
>correspondences derived from the areally dominant
>languages Javanese and Malay.
So were your letter-values meant to be indicative of sound changes in
pre-modern Euir?  How much of it is just adapting the Indic sounds to the
closest native match?  wedging in Euir sounds with no particularly good
Indic correspondent wherever they may fit?
(The /k_h/ letter with value [X_w] seemed especially like an instance of the
latter, and a strange one at that -- /k_h/ is a logical spot for [x], and
/h/ which you've given [x] seems a reasonable place for [X_w], being
extrasystematic.)

Alex

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