Isolating or synthetic

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> writes:
>
>>Haendraeg isnerq:
>
>
> Please don't write me with a 'd'.  It's one of the endless fights in
> my life telling people that my name is without 'd'.  Give me the
> phonology of your lang and let me chose another name, or use 'Henrik'
> literally, or use any other obfuscation, but no d-raped version,
> please!
>
The straight translation would be _Vobsfrandaer_, which somehow
doesn't feel right.  Maybe it would be further reduced to
_Vosfrandaer_ or _Vobfrandaer > Vofrandaer_ "House ruler".
_Yofrahnel_ in the Kidilib dialect.

> Anyway |r| is [R], not [r], no no sandhi /nr/ => [ndr] here, please.
Well if you insist on the nasal you get _Haengaeg_ or _Hengig_ /hi\Nig/,
if you insist on the [R] you get _Haeqaeg_ /h&G&g/ or _Heqig_ /hi\Gig/.
The /G/ actually comes out as [R] for me most of the time.  Sorry you
feel bad about my sandhi rules!
>
>
>>>The whole thing will be polysynthetic again, I think, but that's
>>>more of an accident: I started with an isolating lang, like above,
>>>then made all the particles clitics that attach to the previous
>>>word.  This would yield the following words:
>>
>>Funnily I'm starting to think of going the opposite way
>>with Sohlob!  I can't get no satisfaction :)
>
>
> I liked the polysynthesis of Qthyn|gai, and I want to explore more,
> that's why I decided this.
It's no criticism of you, it is rather me who need to break free
from my agglutinating habits!

>>WRT the local case system, and since I'm looking at Classical
>>Chinese at the moment the idea of chucking the case system
>>altogether came up, ...
>
>
> Hehe. :-) When I learnt some Chinese, my next conlang was highly
> influenced by it, too. :-)
The only problem I have with my book is that they give the
modern Mandarin pronunciation of all Classical words, without
characters, so everything tends to become _yu, wu_ or _zhi_
various diacritics, while the Middle Chinese and Old Chinise
reconstructed forms look seriously cool!

>>Now the problem is how to keep the lang ergative/fluid-S if it is
>>isolating?
>
>
> I don't think so -- Tyl Sjok is fluid-S, too.
>
>
>>Presumably intransitive sentences would be VP while
>>transitive ones be AVP.
>
>
> Hmhm.  Tyl Sjok also has AV.
Perhaps the only way to go if you want to signal such
a constituent order by word order!  OTOH I'll need some
device other than WO to signal emphasis and topic...

>>There is also the problem of justifying vowel harmony
>>if the lang has no (grammatical) affixation!
>
>
> That'd be strange, yes.  Not really an isolating idea. :-)
Well I still can have derivational morphology, and the
verb can keep the aspect marking by internal vowel change(*)
that it now has.  My idea is basically that Kejeb (the
protolanguage) would have had 4-5 cases corresponding to
the 4 possible syllable-final consonants plus vocalic ending,
and that the lang lost nominal inflection by accident when
those final consonants got lost.  OTOH I only too easily can
think of ways the nouns could have developed a new set of
markers from adpositions.   _Taeh_ as a Solosjan would say!

(*) Historically a cjange in final vowel which gave different
umlaut effects before disappearing.

>
> **Henrik
>
>

--

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)