A very short language description (Was Re: Missing Words)

Dumfa hirey. - Greetings to you all.
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>From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
>Wow! You're gonna be wanted on this list! Native speakers of
>non-Indo-European
>languages are always extremely prized on this list!
Please note that in my case "non-Indo-European" plus "not very old" equals
"somewhat sucking English". ;) Trying to improve it.

>Tell us more about this language. "Mamqosian"? It looks a little Native
>American. Was it an influence of those languages or is it just a
>coincidence?
>
No, not really, but the ideas of some polysyntethic American languages are
fascinating. Perhaps I got some inspiration from them, as there are some
Mamqosian verb structures that would take a compound sentence in English,
but this holds very little connection to America.
If it was the word "Mamqosian" you meant, it's englishized language name
from country name Mamqos (from mamuq+e+os, "place of the tribes" or
something like that). The Mamqosians themselves call their language talyai
[the same I think, though I do not know very well all the details of
phonetics], rest of their fictional world uses some variant of mamqe.

The language itself has more influence from Uralic laguages, as it is my
first bigger conlang. The "feel" of sounds (not really enough to say
phonology) I tried to reach was mostly from Dutch and Russian, but I was
never very serious about this, and I speak neither of them.  I also made a
rule that I must be able to pronounce everything I write, which I do not use
with my other languages.

Basic word order is VSO, but it can be changed a lot to emphasize different
things. Rule goes "important things first", which also means in Mamqosian
that head noun comes before its adjective (or other) modifier - unless.
Everything inflects a lot. Even nouns with adpositions must be in
"adpositive" case. Verbs always agree with the number (only two, singular
and plural, throughout the language) of subject, but sometimes also with the
person of subject and/or object. There are also many modes and aspects, but
only two tenses, present and past. Everything can also be derived a lot.

IRL it's a bit more than two years old language which has been evolving with
varying amount of activity. It has less than four hundred of words and a
cronically unfinished swamp for grammar, something always needing
re-thinking. I also make it mostly from inspiration, and thus have words
like "to scent heavily" or "black donkey" (donkey is an important animal to
Mamqosians), but am currently seeking a good word for "to hear". :) It can
maybe be described as "hey, what if..." type of conlang.

>Shouldn't be too difficult. After all, my latest language has no verb "to
>be", "to have", nor verbs of movement ("to go", "to come", "to leave",
>etc...),
>but its numbers, and lots of words that would be considered pronouns or
>adverbs
>in other languages are verbs in this language. Add to that a trigger
>grammar,
>and the mix is quite nice, if difficult to handle! :))
:) I bet it is. I'll be keeping my eyes on whatever you post.


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- Maija Åstrand

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