Re: OT: Blond(e) (Was Re: Genitives and Possessive Adjectives)

I distinguish blonde from blond in my own writings, if only because both
words are acceptable and so I feel we could make good use of a distinction.
I don't, for whatever reason, ever use "brunet". But I do also use "fiancee"
for women and "fiance" for men, even though I am ashamedly not even certain
that I got this from French (please tell me I did).



  _____

From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] On
Behalf Of David Peterson
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 10:31 AM
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Subject: Re: [CONLANG] OT: Blond(e) (Was Re: Genitives and Possessive
Adjectives)



I stand corrected and apalled.  To me, this kind rampant prescriptivism
would be the equivalent to saying that every latinate word should follow the
Latin declension system.  Out of curiosity, I looked up "brunet" on Google,
and I couldn't find any usages that weren't either: (a) French; (b)
someone's surname; or (c) referring to erotic art.  Ob conlang, what if
latinate words *did* have to decline...

Huh.  I can't think of any off the top of my head (that weren't borrowed
from French first or changed in some other way).  No matter.  I'm not
familiar enough with the declension system of Latin to be able to give any
meaninful examples, anyway (that is, unless you want the plural nominative
of a word, or the accusative of a singular feminine noun.  I'm good at
those!).

Okay, really ob conlang, though, I'm reworking an old language, and turning
into a good-old Indo-European/Finno-Ugric mutt (this'll be my first).  Now,
I'm combining the traditional Finnish vowel harmony system with an [ATR]
vowel harmony system reminiscent of an African language like Leggbo.  What I
*really* want to do is to make it so that the low vowels [A] and [&] are
[+ATR], and to then have [-ATR] equivalents, which would be [a\] (inverted
"a") and [a] (below [&]), respectively.  Now I realize that this would be
totally fake, and that low vowels are usually opaque, or at very least
[-ATR] in traditional [ATR] systems, but is there even a slight chance I
could pull this off?  There's no doubt that it would work, but I think what
I'm really after is is there evidence for [+ATR] low vowels?  I've heard
that some midwestern (?) dialects of American English allegedly have a
[+ATR] [&] that really is [&] and not [E].  Has anyone seen any data on
this?  (Dirk, I'm looking in your direction.)

-David