Quick delurk and re-lurk

Hello!

Here I am again, briefly poking my head out of the murky waters of
creative linguistics (and a few rather uglier things)...

First of all, I'm sorry I had to drop out of a few discussions so
suddenly a few weeks ago. Real life interfered... :-(

In the meantime, I've been busy mostly with said real-life stuff.
Don't worry, nothing really horrible happened, just mostly
nitty-gritty stuff that takes all day to take care of and leaves no
energy for frivolous things such as participating in mailing
lists. :-P

I've managed to squeeze in a few hours for conlanging (and generally,
fun linguistic) activities here and there, though. I'm reading
Greville Corbett's book on gender in bits and pieces (mostly on the
bus) and getting lots of inspiration, not just about gender systems;
and I finally got "Describing Morphosyntax" and Dixon's book on
ergativity from Amazon. Whee, fun reading until Easter (at the rate
I'm progressing now, at least). ;-)

And my "Language X" finally has a name! It's called Sakwosin. (That's
/t_hAk_>wOt_hiN/ phonemically and [DAk_>wODi~] phonetically. I'm
pronouncing it [DAk_>"wODi~] for the moment, but I may change my mind
about how and where it's stressed later on.) Since it was a discussion
on Nahuatl morphology that got me started, and since my train of
thought has taken some, um, interesting turns since then, I decided to
take the Nahuatl name of the trickster -- Tlacuatzin, the opossum --
and transform it into something that would fit into my language's
phoneme system. Hence, Sakwosin.

At the moment I'm working on the morphology, mostly. The language will
have a lot of incorporation (and not just the usual noun-into-verb
kind), if I manage to pull off what I'm envisioning now... On the
other hand, the syntax will probably be comparatively boring (er, I
mean straightforward and simple). I'm trying not to touch the
phonetics anymore... all good phonetics-related ideas I have now go
into the "fun stuff to try with future conlangs" file. ;-)

Well, that's all for the moment. I'm going back to lurk mode...

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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