Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

En réponse à Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...>:

> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> >
> >
> >Wow! Writing it manually? Well, I'm impressed.
>
> Ok, I lied, i copied the entire book by xerox machine. Only because my
> library doesnt own it :)
>
:))

> > Personally, for both Romance
> >conlangs I have (Reman and the yet-unnamed one :) ) I didn't go through
> >this
> >process. I didn't think really of sound changes (well, a little more
> with
> >my
> >last project than with Reman,
>
> Well, for me, since i'm working with my own, i thought the best idea for
> me was to figure out all the sound changes I want, and record them. This
> way, i can look over the common ones, then look over my additional ones,
> and come up with something different from actual romance langs. I can
> see
> what these languages do, and then try and think of a way that's
> plausible
> that I can do to make it veer away from those languages.
>
It was the same idea I had for Reman (and I think I managed :) ). You can see
the result at http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr/ if you can handle French.

>
> I'll have to think about this. I already dropped d's intervocalically
> (it's already producing some pretty words, I think: cantado > cantáo
> /kantau/
> >
Isn't that the common pronunciation in Spanish? :)

>
> With long simple vowels, are they just pronounced the same as the short
> ones, but drawn out longer? I'm always confused as to long and short
> vowels, because what I gather from English, it's not really the same
> >
Modern English doesn't really have an opposition between short and long vowels,
but between lax vowels, tense vowels and diphtongs. But it's called short and
long vowels for historical reasons. In Latin, long vowels were simply like the
short vowels, pronounced for a longer time. There was also a small difference of
height in some cases (like long e which could be considered mid-high: /e:/,
while short e was lower: /E/. As short i was also lower than long i, with time
/i/ and /e:/ got mixed up -there's some proofs in people's orthographic
mistakes, like writing sine: without "sene"-), but the main difference (until it
disappeared) was one of time. In a language like Japanese, the difference of
time between short vowels and long vowels is obvious. They are pronounced the
same way, but long ones are twice as long as short ones.

>
> It's spawned at least one interesting sounding word: NOVE > nueve >
> nueue
> /nwewe/  (if I do in fact use the Spanish vowel system (i.e. use
> diphthongs)
> >
Nice one!

> >>
> >> - word final nasals become /N/: CUM > con > cong
> >>
> >
> >Sounds like Southern French.
>
> I'm actually trying to make people wonder "Hmm......Southern French does
> this, yet it does a lot like Spanish does that. Where have I heard this
> language before?". In effect, a kind of language mutt that makes people
> guess.  I wasnt sure about the word final n's becoming /N/. But as I
> thought about it, the more I started to like the idea.
> >
I think you'll manage :) and this idea of final /N/ is nice, quite rare in
Romance langs.

> Of course, with Saalangal, i still work on it, but getting inspired by
> reading about the Romance Langs sparked the conlanging bug again.
>
I know what it is. I've been so much bitten by the conlang bug that I don't
understand how I didn't catch a conlang malaria :)) .

Christophe.