Re: First post: presenting Classical Alyis

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:36:04 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
wrote:
>Hallo!
Thank you very much for your reply!

>Looks good, though I feel as if thinking in letters rather than phonemes
>intruded in the plural forms of the pronominals, with the pairs d-/dh-,
>t-/th-, s-/sh-, z-/zh-.
Indeed I thought first on letters, because of the Ályis writing system I had
then: there was a diacritical mark (which looked like a macron) that
"changed" a consonant's sound, much in the same way the letter 'h' does in
English. Thus, a barred 's' in my script would be transcribed as 'sh', and
it was a quick way of changing something singular for something plural —
nouns end in <-s> and their plurals ended in <-sh> (but I have since changed
that to <-m> for sake of euphony — besides the fact that it makes some
plurals look like latin words, as in <válus> "parchment", <válum>
"parchments" :) ).

Thinking of phonemes, instead, maybe I could change to <d->/<z-> for first
person sg/pl, <t->/<s-> for second person, that is, changing to a fricative
but without changing the point of articulation. But then I feel left out of
choices for masculine and feminine third person, especially the plurals...
I'd be very happy to hear some suggestions here, especially considering that
I don't exactly *like* that initial <z->/<zh->...

Nowadays, however, having studied a little more, I see this pronominal
plural system as a process of synchronical lenition similar to the one that
happens in Modern Hebrew (i.e., [dobim] "two bears", [dov] "a bear"), and
somewhat like in Scottish Gaelic. Thus, the singular forms <d>, <t>, <z> and
<s> are lenited to their plural counterparts <dh>, <th>, <zh> and <sh>. (The
neuter pronominal was also lenited from <l> to <ly> before, but once again
euphony had me look for another sonorant that sounded nice in word-initial
positions.)

I think that sounds plausible, doesn't it?

>But overall, a very mature first conlang!  My first
>conlangs were much more naive in comparison.
Hey, thank you very much for that!

Uh, if I may ask, would you have some more suggestions?

Cheers!
- Abel.

P.S.: Is my terminology correct in the language specification? I really
don't know much on linguistics...

--
“Hæ ástis lástethe!”