Unahoban revisited + vowel inflections

Hi,

        I'm sure most of you don't remember what Unahoban was, so I'll
just say that it's my first and most developed (i.e., the *only* one
developed :-)) conlang. The last update that I did was on September, and
I had a few ideas that wanted to apply to de-uglify it. I had a little
time today, was a little on the conlangy mood (coffee helps), and so
worked a little on it. The updated (but continuously changing) page is
at:

        http://ceu.fi.udc.es/~robe/conlangs/unahoban.html

        It's 73KB of pure XHTML, without images, and a CSS file of <1KB.
Reviews welcome, though first I'd like you to read this mail :-) It's
*long*; don't say that I didn't warn you :-)

        On its previous incarnation, Unahoban had an horrid conjugation
system. Don't lie, you and I know that it's true :-) It had 2
conjugations that made me shiver every time that I looked at them. That
was one of the reasons that I waited for so long to change them: they
scared me :-) So I got rid of them. Bye bye, 2 conjugations; welcome,
nice-and-simple single-conjugation system.

        Brief note about verbs in Unahoban: verbs carry information of
tense (past, present, future), person ("Me", "you", "he/she/them"),
number (singular, plural) and gender (masculine, feminine). There was no
"future" tense before, but a "conditional" that you could after alter
with an external particle ("tam") to become future. This was only
another attempt of making Unahoban "cool and alternative", now I
realize. But I was young: now, with the wisdom earned (sp? "earnt"?) in
... errrm ...  7 months (though, in many senses, my life has changed a
lot in those 7 months), I changed it. Now there are three tenses: past,
present, future. The "tam" particle is kinda the "not yet" particle:
when applied to a past form, it becomes an imperfective past (is that
the name, "imperfective past"?) form; when applied to a present form, it
becomes a progressive present; and when applied to a future form, it
becomes the conditional form. I think it makes more sense now.

        But this was not the only modification, of course. The really
important thing, and the true reason of this mail, is because the
conjugation model in Unahoban is now more complex (and funny!): though
it wasn't meant to be like that, it grew as I was doing it, and now it
uses inflection on the verbal root to design tense and gender and
suffixes to design the rest of the information, though most of the times
it's a bit of a mix of both systems. It's time for an example :-)

        Let's take "cariba", the verb "to open". I'm showing only the
first singular person, but I think that will be enough to make my point
clear.

        Present tense: Iu cariba, Iu caeriba (/y cAribA/, /y caribA/)
        Past tense: Iu careibá, Iu cariubá (/y cAr@bA'/, /y cArybA'/)
        Future tense: Iu câribar, Iu caeribaer (/y cAAribAr/, /y caribar/)

        I'm not 100% sure that I'm using IPA correctly. Anyway, a quick
phonology equivalence, in case it's not obvious: "a" = /A/, "i" = /i/,
"ei" = /@/, "iu" = /y/, "ae" = /a/. In Unahoban, the stressed syllabe
"by default" is the first one in the word. By /car@bA'/ I mean that the
stress is displaced to the last syllabe (i.e., I'm using the apostrophe
as a stress mark). The "â" symbol ("a^", in case you don't see it) is
just a transliteration for the "aa" dipthong.

        The rationale behind this is:

        - In the present tense, the vowel of the stressed syllabe of the
          feminine form "closes" a little. Thus, it passes from /A/ to
          /a/.

        - In the past tense, the vowel of the *previous* syllabe to the
          stressed one (now the last, as denoted by the accent; if you
          don't see it, it's that weird symbol at the end of the word :-))
          changes: it "opens" in the masculine form (/i/ -> /@/) and
          "closes" in the feminine form (/i/ -> /y/).

        - In the future tense, the vowel of the stressed syllabe "opens"
          (/A/ -> /AA/) in the masculine form, and "closes" (/A/ ->
          /ae/) in the feminine form.

        Now, the question: does this make sense? I'm aware that my use
of the verbs "open" and "close" to define the changes is somehow
unappropriate, but as usual, I think you know what I mean :-) I'm not
sure if I'm violating some all-must-know rule in these inflections: are
they possible? Are they probable? Are they just barely enough, or what?
:-) Any examples of similar working {nat,aux,con}langs? I once read here
that Hindi is also heavily inflected. Something alike to this?

        Thanks in advance :-)

PS: the inflection thing came as a wandering thought while I was going
to do the weekly shopping. I was thinking about the difference between
spanish "hombre" (man) and "hembra" (female, used almost exclusively for
animals - unless you like to do annoying and not PC jokes about women,
as I sometimes do O:-) ;-)). There was a very obvious inflection here,
where the change of vowels showed a change of gender, and I thought that
I could use something alike. I don't know if both words come from some
forgotten semitic root or what, but I'd like to know :-)

--
        Roberto Suarez Soto

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