Re: help with starting out

Barry Garcia wrote:
>
> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> >Right now Ajuk doesn't have a word for island, and I'm not in a word
> >creating mood, but using "sal" to mean island,  to steal ("borrow" is
> >the preferred term, but I haven't decided if I'm going to give it back
> >yet) from Saalangal, you'd get salom, meaning "island person", and to
> >pluralize that, you'd have salomas. Then again, if Ajuk speakers
> >encountered Saalangal speakers, they'd probably borrow the name direct,
> >provided they figured out that was the name of the language *before*
> >they figured out what it meant, giving Ajuk "Salangal".
>
> Something I always forget, which i know I shouldn't is a note to say that
> in saalangal, vowels are always pronounced separately. That is, "saal"
> really is said like "sa-al" . Diphthongs are aw , iw, ey, oy, ay
>
It might not make too much of a difference: Ajuk doesn't mark glottal
stops, and you are allowed to have two vowels in a row, as in
"saalangal", and they would be separated by a glottal stop, but in the
long run this is something that Ajuk doesn't tolerate well and it would
eventually be simplified to "salangal". Maybe even the people who first
encountered speakers of Saalangal wouldn't notice the glottal stop
(provided they weren't linguists), because "double-consonants" like that
are very rare in Ajuk.

Either that or you'd incorporate one of the "neutral" consonants, /j/ or
/r/, to make "sajalangal" or "saralangal". Also, if a consonant cluster
needs to be broken up, an /e/ is placed wherever neccessary.

The Ajuk syllabary, I should mention, is (C)(r,l,j)V(C), with r, l, & j
only able to follow  the dental, alveolar, and postalveolar consonants:
/T/, /t/, /d/, /n/, /s/, /z/, /S/, & /Z/. Also, all root forms of words
must end in consonants, save particles and prepositons (although right
now all the prepositions do end it consonants), because the affixes all
follow the form VC, except for the ones that always come at the end,
which are that or V.

Also, where are the sylable boundaries in Saalangal? If the "ng" cluster
falls into one syllable, then it would become "saalanegal", but if they
are one separate syllables, it would remain as "saalangal", and the "n"
would realized as /N/ rather than /n/, but the /g/ would still be
pronounced.

--
Robert