Re: Elvish ideas ...

En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


>That doesn't occur in native words. In the transcription of Yargish, -o- is
>used. This is reasonably safe since Yargish have no /o/ phoneme. I'd guess the
>same is used in any loans, creating three-way ambiguity /oj/~/wi/~/i/.
OK :) .


>It's certainly possible - graphically, "h" is just another letter. I imagine
>it actually indicated a phoneme when the script was originally exapted as a
>kind of diachritic when the language changed. Throwing in the fricativizer
>regardless is a good idea ... but I think I'll have it pronounced as [j]
>before back vowels. The fricativization is supposed to have been caused by a
>later lost prefix e-.
Nice idea. "h" for [j] is NICENESS ;))) .


>I might make the Elvish word for "evil" _magel_ if you don't behave! :-)
Actually, I'd be more than happy if you actually made it so!!! :)) I claim
my evilness! Mwahahahahahahahaha!!!


>'S entirely possible, except I dislike nasal vowels. (And I'm telling a
>Frenchman this? - my survival instincts cannot be working!)
Especially one who can call upon a group of Maggel speakers and have them
come and get you (and try their new recipes on you ;))) . I've heard they
are experimenting with human foie gras. The difficult part is the
force-feeding ;))) ).


>It's a possibility. I'm not quite sure I'm attracted or appalled by the
>implication there'd be accusative possessives like _ceaio_, involving what
>would be a triphthong taking quite a trip in the vocalic tetragon.
In that case, since the "i" corresponds here to [j], which is quite
consonantal, you could have -o pronounced simply [o]. The result would be
[Sajo], nothing too evil (although I have this idea that you could have -o
pronounced in this case [u], the vocalic version of [w] :)))) ).

>  Another
>possiblity is hijacking the pl accusative (_ceaino_ in this case) for use a
>sg, and creating a new pl by strapping on yet another -n. Any anadewism for
>that?
Not that I can think of, but it wouldn't surprise me ;)) .


>I, for some reason, suspected you'd like it. Just wait for the complete
>grammar!
Hehe, waiting, waiting... ;)))


>Oh, and a typological question; the nominal inflection sketched above is
>certainly no isolating, and hardly agglutinative either - does that make it
>fusional? It don't like much like systems like Latin's, which is kind of
>my "instant image" of a fusional language.
Well, my own instant image of "fusional" is something with lots of ablauts,
and very short endings with little variety covering a wide range of uses.
So my instant image of fusional is more Irish Gaelic and German. Latin is
more inflecting (the difference between fusional and inflecting to me is
one of degree. In the inflecting degree, the affixes have collapsed
together so that one single unanalysable affix has more than one function -
like Spanish -í indicates first person singular indicative simple past -,
but they are still reasonably separated from the root - there can be some
effects on the addition of an affix, leading to alternations like French
opaque-opacité, but those are still limited -. In the fusional degree, root
and affix cannot be analysed separately anymore. So languages with ablauts
and infixes are more fusional to me). Of course, since fusional and
inflecting are degrees of the same thing, an inflecting language always
shows both.

The point of the former paragraph is to say that the language you're
creating is indeed fusional, but that doesn't make it like Latin at all ;)))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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