Re: tolkien?

Alex Fink wrote:
> Phonosemantics suggests that 'sound symbolism' occurs in natlangs:
> this is the idea that to some extent individual phonemes contribute to
> the meaning of morphemes, which sounds just like what you're
> describing.  For more information, Wikipedia's article on
> phonosemantics is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonosemantics .
very interesting! thank you! now I feel a lot better about it.

> You could explain a pattern like this in other ways as well.  For
> instance,
> if these associations primarily involve nouns, you could say that an
> ancestor of your conlang had a noun class system in which the classes
> had
> semantic significance, and class was marked by a prefix on nouns.
> Then if
> the other morphological expressions of the noun class were lost, but
> the
> prefixes on nouns remained, you would be left with groups of
> semantically
> connected nouns with the same initial segments.
it's a good idea and I'll definitely consider using it. however, the
language has now become part of a multilingual conworld, and the basic
history of the language is already mapped out, so such changes would be
very intrusive at this point. (not that that's necessarily a bad
thing...)

one of the ancestral tongues* was a loglang, so it might just work.
thanks again! :)

* there were four of them, and yes, I can explain that.

Camilla
"anaylenda nenenad"