Re: Telona on the web at last

Stone Gordonssen wrote:
>>>
Before I slept last night, I finally had time to read your telona.doc.
I sense you also encountered some of the problems I did in tyring to
create Nenshat, one of my conlangs.
<<<

Really?  I must hear more about Nenshat!  Do you have a website?  Is
it allnoun?  I would be fascinated to hear which problems, and what
your solutions were.

>>>
1. I believe I see how (Beat + David) is indicated in Telona via
accents (or defaults), but how is (DUMMY - beat) indicated?
<<<

When I wrote DUMMY, I just meant to imply some suitable proform or
anaphor or something.  Actually the pitch accents are not involved in
the distinction between 'beat + David' and 'X - beat', it's a
phonological process (planned for section 4...).

For example, let's say that the proform might be 'te', the translation
of 'beat' might be 'fila', and we'll use 'david' for David, which is
actually phonotactically possible in Telona, although it comes out as
[Da:P1D] :))  Then, fila + david > fila aldavid, and te - fila > te
ivila.  The two operators + and - correspond to two modes of lenition,
in a rather Tolkienian kind of way.  You only need accents when
there are three or more words, to show how they're nested.

>>>
2. What's the syntax for questions and negatives?
<<<

An utterance is marked as a question by an interrogative pitch contour
on the accent of the final word.  For yes-no questions, you can simply
apply this to any old sentence - "He's from England?" - or you can add
in a "Perhaps...?" or an "...isn't that right?"  Wh-questions are
similar - for "What are you holding?", you would say "Perhaps you're
holding something?".  In English these aren't really equivalent, I
know, but in Telona the proform corresponding to 'something' has a
hint of 'what?' about it, only rarely being used outside questions.

Negatives ... ah, that's a rather long topic.  Basically, to negate a
phrase, you prefix 'not +' ('ka') to it.  However, the effect that has
is to refer to only the entities that the original phrase didn't refer
to.  For example, if 'tane' means 'man', then 'ka-thane' means
'anything that is not a man'.  So, to translate for example 'He isn't
welcome here.', you would effectively say 'He is anything but welcome
here.', or 'He is something other than welcome.'

Does that help?

Jonathan.

[reply to jonathan underscore knibb at hotmail dot com]
--
'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'