Re: Betreft: Re: New Lang: Leropho (LONG !)

>>> Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> 04/21 3:00  >>>
At 4:40 pm +0200 19/4/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 20:00 18.4.2000 +0100, Raymond Brown wrote:
>> >
>> >Then I decided to make a lang that sounds like Greek, but has other
>> >morphology and syntax.
>>
>>As Greek has had so much phonetic variation over the three half thousand
>>years during which it has been recorded, I think this needs defining.
>>Sounds like what Greek?
>
>School Greek? ;-)
Not so, it seems - I guess, like me, you were misled by the 'modern Greek
consonants' + 'ancient diphthongs'   ;-)
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At 12:13 pm +0200 20/4/00, Rob Nierse wrote:
[.....]
>As I said I never took class in Greek. So Greek to me is Modern
>Greek (what I hear on vacation).
Right.

>I have to admit, it was quite a challenge
>to create somthing that has to look like somthing I didn't know.
Challenges like that make conlanging more interesting IMO  :)

I wrote:
>>The consonants you give below are certainly not ancient Greek of any kind,
>>but are similar to that of modern Greek, tho lacking /z/.
..and Rob replied:
>No surprise it looks like Modern Greek when you know the above story.
Will you zeta at all?
And now I know that its modern Greek from where you start, I'm wondering
what you are doing with the vowels.  I guess from what you wrote that EI,
EY, AI and AY are being used, as of course they originally were, as true
diphthongs.  But if EI is a diphthong once more, shouldn't OY also be so,
as well as OI?  This seems to me to imply that Y becomes /u/ as it once was
(and remained so in Doric).

--->
I'm sure zeta will not be in the inventory (or Ed must decide the other way).
ei = ey, eu = ew, ai = ay, au = aw, oi = oy (we missed that one in the inventory too)
but ou = u. I had [u] written as 'ou', because 'it looks so Greek' to me.
As you see, strange things can happen when a layman starts to work
with languages he doesn't know.
<----

But what about the vowels the Ionians added, i.e. eta and omega?  Will they
be used?

---->
They will not be used.
To be onest, I'm getting interested in Greek language history. What were
eta and omega for? Did they lengthen the vowel [e] and [o]?

Rob
<----