Re: Today's all-purpose reply (inc. Tech syllable inversion)

FFlores:

>Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:
> >
> > Now onto a distinctive feature of Tech inflection.  Not only are vowels
> > shifted betwixt one of three gradations (zero/'schwa' < short > long),
>and
> > consonant mutations along the lines of Welsh and Irish, a CV sequence in
>the
> > original root becmes VC -- that is, it reverses!
>
>Do you know of any natlang that does this (or similar stuff)? I think
>I once had that in mind, but I thought it wasn't very naturalistic.
>Do you have any (linguistic, diachronic) idea why this reversal happens?
You know, I think Arabic especially (and maybe some other Semitic languages)
does something like this, at least shifting vowels around in a word.  I came
up with the CV > VC shift because I wanted some way to expand my vowel
inventory from the basic seven-ish to a bunch more.  I wanted front rounded
vowels especially.  I also wanted to 'compress' words more, reducing the
length of words by increasing the number of phonemes and creating tons of
mergers, sandhi shifts, you name it.

The format of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, by the way, includes syllabics
for not only CV, but VC combinations.  This is true for Elamite, Akkadian,
and Hittite, to name a few.  You have pretty much the same consonant scheme
as the Semitic languages do (i.e. the Hebrew set), with the four vowels a,
e, i and u.  I think the reversed syllables would be used to indicate long
vowels and final consonants, or at least it seems that way.

> > esso  'to stay' (also can mean 'to be')
> >
> > There is an implied glottal stop at the beginning of the word, so it's
> > really ?esso, where ss = retroflex s.  You have CVCV, two CV's, so you
>have
> > the following permutations:
> >
> > eoss
> > e'sso (?e > e?)
> > e'oss
>
>What do these mean? Does the reversal have predictable grammatical
>meaning?
That I haven't determined yet.  I'm still in the vocabulary stage; I'll be a
while before I get to grammar.  Expect something of a mix of Semitic,
Indo-European and Kartvelian grammar with many noun cases, sex and animacy
in gender, four numbers (including two plurals, and a stark raving mad
verbal construction with polypersonal encoding, Arabic verb derivations...

>Do you by any chance have a memory chip implanted in your brain? :)
I doubt it.  I have a terrible memory.  But who needs memory when you got a
computer and about 1,000 pages of paper piled knee deep on the apartment
floor.  Scary, I lost my cat again this week.

Danny

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