CONLANG Digest - 24 Nov 2000

> From:    BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
> Subject: Re: rhotics (was: Hellenish oddities)
>
> I wonder how widespread lgs with more than one "r" phoneme are?  Spanish
is
> famous for its r/rr, Portuguese and Occitan have r/R, but beyond
> that?  What about people's conlangs?  Wanic has a slew of laterals but
only
> one rhotic.
Modern Atlantic has the regular phoneme <r> /r/ ([r] trill, [4] tap) and the
fricative trill <r'> /r_r/ ([r_r], [r_r_j]), the fricative developing from
palatalized <r>.

All the other Hadwan languages only have the one <r> trill/tap.

Daimyo language has one <r>, pronounced like American English <r>.

> From:    Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: backwards conlanging
>
> I've read several conlang sites that suggest starting with an
> ancestor-language and then deriving conlangs from the ancestor-conlang.
(...which is something I find quite useful, as I personally find my evolved
conlangs to feel smoother than my ex nihilo ones...)

> Does anyone have suggestions for a related-but-faux conlang technique for
> same?
The way I slightly understand it, one way to reconstruct a protolang from
just one language might be... rrr..  sort of like the idea of 'underlying
form'.  If, say, an affix has one appearance in some stems, and another in
other stems, one might try to reconstruct an "original"/"underlying" form
that in your modern language produces two forms due to sound change but in
the protolanguage was only one, and perhaps find a way to reverse-engineer
that kind of sound change elsewhere.  Er.  Or not.

     *Muke!
--
http://muke.twu.net/
"A single human lifetime is far too short a period in which to discover how
to live a life."
                --D. Stephenson Bond