Re: R: Re: Stress marking (was: Re: CONLANG Digest - 14 Oct2000(maglangs plea!))

> ObConlang: How receptive are your conlangs to borrowings?  Utakassí
> generally prefers calques to loans, altho it wasn't always like that.
> Proto-Kassi-Plia borrowed a *lot* of foreign words, including the
> numbers 7-12.
>
Gevey, when I was developing it decades ago, had lots of
borrowings from english, french, russian, swahili, etc (basically, any
word I liked the sound and feel of). But since development started
again a couple of years ago, I've junked the entire vocabulary (almost
- a few words survived) and started fresh.

From a concultural point of view, this is just as well. Gevey is
spoken in a region of uninviting continent, on a backwater planet long
cut off from other space-faring humans. Over 6,000 years, I would hope
that the language would have developed a unique vocabulary. And there
can be no borrowing, if there is no contact (there are of course a lot
of other languages on the planet, and they influence each other and
borrow from each other, but as they have an equally esoteric
vocabulary this would not be noticable to terran language speakers).

Of course the real reason why I can now develop such a vocabulary is
because we have computers and programs which can churn out randomly
generated words by the million - it was a lot harder in the early
1980s, when I had to think up every individual word myself - now I
just get to choose the ones I like from generated lists.

Rik

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