Re: Elvish ideas ...

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> writes:

> 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.
Go forth!  I am looking forward to seeing a new (hopefully) naturalist
conlang, after so much constructivist (i.e., non-naturalist) stuff
that has been dominating this list lately.

As quite some people here on the list might already know, I am also
working on something I call `Elvish', even though my `Elves' are
simply humans.

> The Elves we're speaking of are essentially just skinny, long-lived humans
> with pointy ears - they are not immortal, not in possession of any inherent
> superior wisdom or anything like that. Were they to be found in our world,
> biologists would, little doubt, conclude they were another species within the
> Homo genus.
Are they interfertile with humans?

> [...]
>
> Speaking of orthography, the language uses eighteen glyphs, romanized as:
>
> p b m t d n k g ñ r l s i e a o u h
>
> Most are what you'd expect. _h_ isn't really a letter; it turns the preceeding
> (oral) stop into a fricative; _bh_ = [B], _th_ = [T] and so on.
Much like the orthography of my own Elvish languages, where fricatives
are spelled by h-digraphs, too.  But _h_ also has its own letter
value, namely (big surprise ;-)) /h/.

>       As might be
> guessed, fricatives (other than /s/) are relative newcomers in the phonology.
>
> _t d c g_ are [t d k g] before back vowels; before _i_ and _e_ they're
> respectively [tS dZ tS dZ] - notice that the alveolar-velar distinction is
> neutralized; it returns with fricativization, since _th dh ch gh_ before front
> vowels is [T D S Z] (cf [T D x G] before back ones).
Nice!

> [...]
>
> As regards morphology, I've this far largely looked at nouns.
>
> A noun can take up to four "modifications" - it can be marked as definite,
> plural, accusative and possessive. The corresponding unmarked noun is
> therefore indefinite, singular, nominative and, well, non-possessing.
Makes for a total of 16 different forms, with just four morphological
elements that can be added to the noun stem.  Very efficient!

> An uninflected noun never begins in a fricative; fricativizing an initial stop
> makes the noun definite, eg _creach_ "castle", _chreach_ "the castle". It
> should be stressed that "fricative" and "fricativizing" here essentially
> means "anything spelt as stop+h" and "add -h" respectively.  Thus we also see
> _cea_ [tSa] "lady" and _chea_ [Sa] "the lady". 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.
How about voiceless liquids like those found in Welsh, and h-prefixion
in case of initial vowels?

> Plurals, more well-behavedly, are formed by adding _-an_, or, after vowels,
> simply _-n_, except, for no good reason, when nouns end in a fricative, in
> which case the fricative becomes a stop (AKA, the "h" is dropped) and a
> homorganic nasal is inserted before the newly-born stop. Eg _cean_ "ladies",
> _canan_ "lords" (sg _can_), but _creanc_ "castles".
This is an interesting complication.  I like it!  Makes the umlaut
plural I have in Modern Low Elvish look trite ;-) (In Modern Low
Elvish, plural is formed by i-umlaut of the word's last vowel, i.e.
a > e, o > ø, u > y; if the last vowel is front (e, i, ø, y), the
plural is the same as the singular.  The i-umlaut dates back to a lost
plural marker -i.)

> Accusatives, serving as direct objects, and probably in some other
> miscellaneous functions, are formed by suffixing -o to the stem. It goes
> before the pl -an (which loses its -a-), but of course after the pl infix with
> final former fricatives. Not yet sure how it combines with nouns ending in
> vowels.
In languages that have separate plural and case affixes, the plural is
usually closer to the root than the case.  So you have STEM-PL-ACC
rather than STEM-ACC-PL.

> The possessive, finally, is formed by infixing an _-i-_ , turning the stem
> vowel into an diphthong. Pronunciation; _ii_ [ej], _ei_ [ej], _ai_ [aj], _oi_
> [oj], _ui_ [uj]. Yes, _oi_ is ambigious between [wi] and [oj]. The possessive
> goes after the thing possessed; _chreach chain_ "the castle of the lord".
This looks very nice.  Possibly a trace of a lost genitive marker *-i
that caused diphthongization as a kind of umlaut effect?

>       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".
This is very good!  It is called "suffixaufnahme", and I have fallen
in love with it, and use it in my own version of Elvish.

What happens if the possessum is itself in possessive case, as "the
lords" in "the castles of the lords of the land"?

> Well, that'll have to suffice for now.
Nice work so far.  Keep on!

Jörg.

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