Re: Elvish ideas ...

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Andreas Johansson <andjo@F...> wrote:
 > I mentioned, last week I think, that I've begun to work on an Elvish
language
 > for the same coniverse that hosts Yargish. Most aspects still remain
quite
 > hazy, but some things are settling down, in particular phonology and
spelling.
 > I thought I'd present some of it here, in the hope of attracting some
feedback.

Pretty cool stuff.  Although the phonology doesn't restlessly
please my ears, [xrjajx] and all, the orthography certainly
looks very aesthetic, and it's non-trivial, which is a Good
Thing.  I strove for similar goals in my notoriously unpopular
Oro Mpaa.



 > I'm not yet sure what to do
 > with nouns beginning in a vowel, liquid or [w-] or [j-] - leaving those
 > without a definite-indefinite distinction strikes me as odd, but I don't
 > really know what I want to do with them. Something evil, little doubt.

Well, if the |h| used to stand for /h/, you could always
settle on |hV| = /hV/, |hl| = /K/, |hr| = /r_0/, |hoV| = /WV/,
|heV| = /CV/ as an intermediate step, and maybe /V l r w j/ as
the modern pronunciation, leaving the |h| as an inaudible
relic in the writing, as Christophe suggested.  Or if you like
/K r_0 W C/, why not just keep them?



 > To
 > top it off, it, out of misplaced sympathy, echoes any accusative
ending on the
 > thing possessed, giving us things like _chreanco chainon_ "the
castles (acc)
 > of the lords".

I kinda suspected that from the way you introduced number,
definiteness, case and possession as linearly independent.
=P  Anyway, it's a cool thing to do.

Congratulations, by the way, on finding four non-trivial ways
to mark these features, allowing the superposition of all
four without becoming unpronounceable.  It's hard to come up
with something original; sometimes I think Tolkien has
already used up all the cool stuff (like tul- > utúlie) for
Quenya.  =P



-- Christian Thalmann

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