Re: Sally Caves' Survey, A Question

----- Original Message -----
From: "Elliott Lash" <erelion12@...>

> Hello!
>
> I'm back with Silindion from a a long hiatus. I just
> noticed that Sally Caves has a survey out about
> several interesting topics. I'd like to fill it out,
> if it's still available.
I'll send that to you immediately, Elliott!  Welcome back, and your
Silindion is beautifully slippery, sylvan, and mellifluous!

> Also, Sally, in a thread the
> other day, I saw the Teonaht word _ebra_ 'says', I
> liked that Welshism very much! :) Are there any more
> of them lurking about?
Good God!  Welsh ebr, and Teonaht ebra.  You know, I never even thought
about that before now!  Ah, jeez, I do believe I made "ebra" up in my teen
years, well before I was studying Welsh.  Let's look at the old notebook.
Yep, "say: twevare, ebrare."  This is before I went to college; it's before
I even changed the old infinitive suffix, stolen from Latin, to "rem," and
WAY before I made the tripartite verb forms (volitional, non-volitional, and
stative).

As a graduate student, I was studying Welsh and Old Irish (and Old English)
while I was making the heaviest inroads on my Teonaht in the late seventies,
and I'm sure a few Welshisms have crept into it, but I was very determined
not to make Teonaht a Celtic language, or to base it on Welsh or any known
language.   It is influenced by Welsh in that it is heavily analytic (I was
so sick of Latin!), but I had already devised the peculiar word order.  It
has no initial mutations except in the vocative, no periphrastic with "to
be," no genitives formed by juxtaposition, no conjugated prepositions
(instead I invented a system of deictic positionals that distinguished
between static and motive), no VSO word order, no preverbal or predicate
particles.  No constructions like "fear is upon him."  Adjectives follow
nouns, but only because I started out with Spanish.  Where T. does show
Welsh influence is in the construction "I loved the boy red his hair," which
is also Hebraic, IIRC.  It picked up the equative from Welsh.  (But Teonaht
now has an "alterative"!).   I erased my old participles in Teonaht and
chose a more "Celtic" way of expressing passives and progressives ("his
beating he got"; "with singing she," etc.)  I decided late to incorporate
the "be + preposition" to express possession, but only alienable possession.
I loved Welsh for slightly different reasons from that given by Tolkien, who
thought Welsh was so beautiful.  I loved the cockamamy sounds of it, which
jibed with the cockamamy sounds I was making up in Teonaht.  Tebygu, for
instance.  Or mympwy.  (Although T. has only recently started incorporating
the strong mid vowel /@/.  Welsh has a lot of -wy endings (Myfanwy), lots
of -bren endings.  And long words, which gave me hope for my Teonaht which
sports "tatilynakose" (/'tatIli'nakuse/ "disgusting") and "Erahenahil"
(/Er@'hEn@hIl/ "paradise").  I took "ha" for the vocative interjective
straight from Middle Welsh, but I took the "hl" construction from Old
English.  Teonaht also has hr, a drawn-out voiceless trill, but it also has
initial lr, dl (which too gives way to gl), mr, and hm, which unlike Welsh
is a true devoiced nasal.  Very hard to say with a cold.  Originally,
Teonaht was largely pen-penultimate; it has become more penultimate over the
years with the Law of Detachment.  I have taken NO vocabulary willfully from
Welsh, so this ebra comes as a rude shock! :) The emphasized pronouns were
introduced when I decided to make Teonaht an active language with my split
"nominative," agent and experiencer.  As for the "u," pronounced /j/ (uon
/jun/; ouar /'ojar/) and so forth, that was decided upon when I was ten or
eleven, and I've kept that graphic quirk in Roman transcriptions.  It's
definitely NOT the "u" of Welsh!   Ychafi! :)

No, I love Welsh.  But my Teonaht is not even definitely Indo-European.  It
may have been influenced by the hotly debated "Celtic substratum."  >-}

Sally
etc.

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