Re: Elvish ideas ...

Quoting Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

> --- 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 used to be very much in favour of perfectly phonemic scripts (the result of
my native language having a dozen ways each to write intial [j] and [x],
perhaps). The spelling of Tairezazh owes much to that feeling. But I also had
a contradictory affection for outrageously complex and ambiguous
orthographies. With the wisdom of advancing age (I'm 21!), I'm with this
language trying to go along a middle road, creating an orthography that is
both quirky and simple enough to be believable as one having
developed "naturally" for a language in a essentially medieval setting. I'm
probably going to introduce some outright irregularities at some point.

>  > 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?
Well, going about in my usually habit of starting with "modern" forms and
working out the lang's development in reverse, I still don't know what sound
|h| originally indicated. The transliteration is chosen based in it's modern
usage. It's position in the script suggests it was a vowel - perhaps /i-/
or /@/.

>  > 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.
I guess a case(!) could be made that the possessive "really" is a kind of
adjective, agreeing with it's noun. Is there any hard-and-fast rule for
telling a possessive adj and a possessive/genitive noun apart? I've seen
genitives taking extra case endings parallelly to how the Elvish possessive
accusative, and still being considered nominal genitives, so I assume that
cannot be the criterion.

> 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
Thanks. Let's just hope I've got any originality left for the verbs!

                                                            Andreas