Hello again - also re: gzb

kq goq tq hoq.

Hello again, y'all.

I unsubscribed from CONLANG in early 1997 because I was getting
busy with my last year of school.  During spring break in 1998 I
started working on my current project, gzb, & have worked on it off
and on for the last year.  My life has sort of settled down again
after graduating, moving, starting a job, etc., & I'm working on gzb
and subscribing Conlang again now... Infomation on gzb is on my
web page now, though it's a bit messy -- a couple of months ago
someone asked to see it & I just uploaded the text files with my
notes on't and created an HTML table-of-contents front end.


Here's an overview.

gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box (language idiosyncratic-ADJ new-ADJ) I
design as a psychological experiment, sort of like Lojban only
somewhat more naturalistic.  It's mostly isolating except for a few
word categories formed by an agglutination with limited scope, like
the Esperanto "correlatives" - here, the postpositions and the logic
conjunctions (and, inclusive-or, exclusive-or, etc).  The phoneme
set is reasonably large, a superset of my dialect of English plus
most of the neat consonants from German & vowels from French,
plus nasal & voiced forms of all the above, and five clicks (the latter
only used as pronouns).   My ASCII orthography is a superset of X-
convention Esperanto (c, cx, j, jx, hx, etc. have their Esperanto
values), with additional x-diacritics such as ax /&/, px = labial trill,
and q=diacritics such as sq = German ich laut, tq = dental click,
etc.  Details on the web page.

Morphophonemics: any consonant can begin a syllable, only
liquids and semivowels can come between an initial consonant and
the vowel, only nasals, liquids or semivowels can end a closed
syllable.   15000+ possible one-syllable roots.

gzb has an open-ended set of  "case-markers" which are simply
compound postpositions, coming after any noun phrase.   Any root
word can compound with one of the cardinal postpositions i (at), o
(to), rq (from) to form a "case-marker".  Most common are tu-i,
agent, hxy-i, patient, miq-i, topic, nxiqn-i, comment, nxiqw-i,
instrumental (for body parts), etc.  "Genitive" can use one of
several roots for different types of "having": daxm-rq, from the
author or parent, sxaxj-i, at the possession of, sxu-i, a quality of,
liqw-i, a relative of, etc.

Root words are all nouns, various suffixes form modifiers and verbs
(stole that from Vorlin).

Counting: only prime numbers have root words (I have roots for
everything up to 113 plus a few other useful ones like 1999), also
things like pi, aleph-null, etc.  Straight compounding for
multiplication, conjunctions for adding, subtracting, etc.  The
number words are in numerical order when in alphabetical order.

I make extensive use of suffixes similar to the Esperanto -um- infix.
-cjaj derives something more specific, -toxn something more
general than the root; -rox derives an idiomatic adjective from a
concrete noun or proper name, e.g.

 raxm-rox, independent, from {raxm}, a cat.
Also {raxm-toxn}, any animal.
But {leq'pax-toxn}, an insectivore (from bat).
graxm-cjaj, an email, from {graxm}, a message.

That's it for now.



Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/
Book reviews, essays, etexts, information about Esperanto, etc.