Re: Unahoban revisited + vowel inflections

On May/04/2003, Pablo David Flores wrote:

> Hey! I have two verb and two noun classes in Terbian (my newest).
> Admittedly they're a pain in the neck (I guess Spanish genders
> and conjugations must be a pain for non-natives, too) but they
> add variety (I'd always made conlangs with single-conjugation
> systems before...).
        It's ok; but as you said, you'd made only conlangs with
single-conjugation systems before. Unahoban is my first conlang, so I'll
stick to that too :-) It's not good to do things complicated at first
just for the sake of being complicated :-)

> Is "c" = /c/ or /k/? (/c/ is the unvoiced palatal stop).
        My fault, it's /k/ O:-) Anyway, that's how I always intended it
to be and how it's in the web page %-) It was just that I fumbled it
when transliterating the examples in the mail O:-)

> The stress mark is /'/ (/"/ in proper X-SAMPA) but it goes
> before the stressed syllable.
        Ok, noted.

> That would have to be fronting instead of closing. /A/ is a back vowel,
> /a/ is a front vowel.
> /i/ -> /@/ is lowering and centralization.
> /i/ -> /y/ is rounding.
        What a mess :-) It seems that I was pretty random in those
inflections.

        I'll have to look the charts to make it more "lineal". But
anyway, should it be lineal? Does it make sense as it's now? I mean that
I wanted inflections to be more or less lineal because I thought that's
how inflection works in other languages; but maybe it's not like that at
all :-? Maybe it varies wildly from one language to another :-m

> I'm not sure where IPA ends and orthographic transliteration begins,
> here. Maybe you should arrange the vowels within a vowel triangle, and
> work the changes from that.
        I'm sorry, but I don't know what's a "vowel triangle" O:-)

["Hombre" -> "hembra"]
> Probably someone answered this already, but no, there isn't (AFAICT).
        Darn. I thought I was right in this one :-) Thanks for you
explanation. Is there any online resource with more changes like these?

--
        Roberto Suarez Soto