Re: conlang servey

On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, Heather Rice wrote:

> Language name
KuJomu

> creator's name
Gracie

> realative date of creation
About 1987.

> country and
> first language of creator
Washington DC USA, Spanish/English

> purpose of conlang
> (auxlang, conlang, loglang, . . . ).
To go with the Culture, of course.

> Phonetics:  number of consonants,
Hmm.  Hard to say.  It doesn't follow the roman alphabet.  Quite a bit more,
though.

> number of vowels,
12, I think.

> presence of nasalization,
I think so, but not much.

> where the
> accent generally falls.
It's a melting-pot language, so it's not a generalized thing.

> Morphemes:  presence of allomorphs, mutation,
> assimilation, prefixes, suffixes, infixes,
> suprafixation, dicontinuation, exclusion, total
> fusion, subtraction, reduplication.  Is the conlang
> agglutinating, isolating or fusional?
Wow, tech talk.  I believe it's agglutinating.

> Nouns and such:  subclasses of nouns (common/proper,
> abstract, things that may not be expressed explicitly
> in affixes), presence of cases and how many and what
> kind, kind of possession (alienable, inalienable, no
> distinction, etc.) presence of gender, number,
> articles, demostratives, adjectives, quantatives.  Are
> comparatives expressed by affix, word order or both?
Yanno... all this time (what, 16 years now?) I've just been creating a language
and haven't really named anything.  It's pretty much complete, if anybody wants
to see it and actually *count* all these things...

> Do pronouns express gender, number, declension?
Yes.

> Are
> there indefinite pronouns, possessed pronouns?
Yes.

> Others?
I do believe so, but I'm not sure if they wouldn't fall under one of the other
categories.

> Are prepositions bound, unbound?
Bound by habit, but not by necessity.

> How many
> prepositons (approximate).
I counted 78, but I think a few of those were different words for the same
meaning.

> Verbs and such:
> Are person, number, object expressed with the verb?
Sometimes.

> Are there static verbs (to be)?
Yes (so I'm unoriginal), but they aren't necessary.

> Kind
> of gender.
Male, Female, Unknown, Indifferent, Mixed.

> Are past, present, future expressed?
Yes, and pretty extensively.

> Is mode express
Yes, and pretty extensively.

> Manner?  Aspect?
Yes.

> Please list
> what kinds of manner and aspect the conlang expresses
> in its verbs.
Hmm... I'm afraid I worked more on the actual *language* than on the *language
theory*... Perhaps somebody looking at the text could answer this for me someday.

> Presence of adverbs
Yes.

> Can nouns, adjectives, adverbs be changed to verbs and
> vice versa?
Yes.

> Presence of adjective, adverbial clauses and relative
> pronouns.
Yes.

> Word order and is it free or strict?
It's fairly free.

> Are
> adjectives, adverbs and prepositions before or after
> the modified word?
Adjectives and adverbs could go either way.  Prepositions are usually before.

> Is the word order changed in a
> question?
No, but there's a question indicator word.

> How many (approximately) conjugations are
> there?
If I understand the question correctly, in excess of 43.  But I tend to confuse
modals with tenses, and likely don't understand the question correctly in the
first place.

> What is the number base for the numeral system
10

> Presence of idioms, irregular forms of nouns
> and verbs.
Got 'em.

> Is the language syntax very predictable
Yes, if you're coming from a native romanesque-language-speaking world.  But I
don't think it would qualify as a romlang.

> How much literature has
> been produced and what kind (I'm not talking about
> translations, but stuff you wrote yourself).
Not much at all.  Lately I've just been translating Aesop's Fables.  I had been
using it for the books i was working on, but they were lost in the Great Crash
of '97.  It's changed a lot since then, anyway.

> Is there
> a history and dictionary of the conlang?
Yes.

> Script
> invented?
Yes - my pride and joy.

> Other conlangs produced by the creator of
> this one.
Sort of, but they're mostly developed just for this language to have something
to have derived from; they're pretty much in my head, not documented or anything.

> If you could summarize your conlang in a sentence,
> what would you write?
KuJomu was designed to sound and look difficult but be pretty easy to learn to
speak and write.  It's supposed to facilitate communication; make it easy to say
*anything* that needs to be said (though combining this with adhering to the
mindset of the corresponding culture has kind of backfired), and the writing is
designed in such a way that by reading aloud one can hear exactly how the writer
speaks/thinks.

Okay, two sentences.  It's been one of those days.

> On my servey, I knew I couldn't possibly cover
> everything that conlangs will be, so I included a long
> notes section.  If you want to provide any other
> information about the conlang, just keep typing!
Sorry I wasn't more familiar with the technical terms to respond better...

----------------------------------------------------------
INTPs are simply immune to force.  They are like water.
You can go over and around them but they cannot be pushed,
even though most people end up standing around baffled
as to how they didn't get their way when the INTP hasn't
appeared to put up any active resistance.     -Val