Re: I'm back (OurTongue)

En réponse à Rob H <magwich78@...>:

> Hello again, Christophe,
>
Hi! :)

>
> Well, have you looked at Mr. Ryan's website, particularly his inventory
> of Proto-Language
> monosyllables?
Yep. All this looked so much amateurish that he could have said that God gave
him that knowledge that it wouldn't have changed anything ;)) . There's just
nothing to back up his claims, except some prejudice about how humanity was in
the beginning... But it's great material for a conlang, I admit ;)) .

> linguistics ;) .  Yes, it
> is true that OurTongue is something of an artlang; however, it's also
> (an attempt at) a
> naturalistic conlang through use of the Proto-Language monosyllables.
> One of the main design
> concepts was to make it look like it (or something similar to it) could
> actually have existed in
> the past.  So it looks related to IE, Uralic, Altaic, and (to a lesser
> extent) Kartvelian
> languages.
>
There's nothing wrong in that ;)) .

>
> Personally, I like this system because it shows a more ancient
> inflectional paradigm with the
> pronouns - such a distinction between nouns and pronouns is common in
> natural languages.  However,
> do you think that ergative/nominative mi vs. absolutive/accusative me is
> insufficiently
> distinctive?
>
Of course! French doesn't seem to have a problem differentiating masculine le
from feminine la, so mi vs. me looks quite enough. And what about the
declension of "ego" in Latin?
Nom.: ego
Acc.: me
Gen.: mei
Dat.: mihi
Abl.: me (IIRC this one has long e, while it has short e in the accusative)
And yet it seemed to be OK ;)) .

> In addition, Ryan makes note on his website to an ancient system of verb
> differentiation between
> momentary and durative: in original CV-CV forms, stress on the first
> syllable conveyed a durative
> meaning, while stress on the second syllable conveyed a momentary
> meaning.
Strange. My gut feeling would say exactly the contrary :)) .

>
> t?a'-rha 'hand-flies' > dar@ > dara- 'tremble'
> t?a-rha' 'hand-flies-repeatedly' > d@ra > dera- 'fear'
>
> The idea for the second one is trembling repeatedly for some amount of
> time, as from fear.
OK.

  The
> schwa in the second derivation became e due to its medial position in
> the root; subesquently the
> stress-accent retracted to the first syllable.  Do you think there is a
> sufficient distinction
> between "dara" and "dera" for rather disparate meanings?
>
Actually, you're thinking the wrong way round: *because* the meanings are so
disparate, there's no problem having the words nearly identical. Context will
always make it clear what is meant. It's words with near identical meanings
that need to be different enough from each other in order not to merge, because
in that case context may not be enough to distinguish the two words. It's the
eternal mistake made by philosophical IALers...

> The conditional in -le is from PL *nhe, which can mean 'little, fragile,
> come apart.'  My rational
> for this is that adding that to the verb adds the meaning of 'fragile'
> to the action, so the verb
> loses 'stability' -- i.e. it no longer expresses a concrete statement of
> fact.  Does this seem
> reasonable to you?
I dunno. I doubt speakers would come up suddenly with the idea "well, let's
express uncertain statements with the syllable meaning 'fragile'". You have to
come up with an original use that explains why a syllable meaning "fragile"
came to be used after verbs, *while it still had this meaning*. Or else you
have to have this syllable changing meaning already *before* it became used as
particle. The evolution of meanings has to make sense, *without looking already
at the end result*. The users of the language had no idea what the end result
would be, so you have to explain why they *began* to use this syllable as
particle first. It's complicated, but it's the only way to make the evolution
naturalistic. You have to work from the source to the result, not the other way
round.

>
> In my view, the preterite (< perfective) tense formant -i is the most
> basic, and is appended
> directly to the inflectionless verb stem; any other formants are added
> *after* it.
Understandable.

  Thus, there
> are four participles: present active, present passive, preterite active,
> and preterite passive.
> There are also two basic masdars, one for the present stem and one for
> the preterite stem.  I
> think this is a simple and elegant solution.
>
And very naturalistic, and very IE-like ;)) .

>
> Perhaps there could also be masdars and participles formed from the
> conditional stems, e.g.
> daraleva 'possibly trembling' or darailema 'having possible been
> trembling.'  Yet another idea is
> using -le as a hypothetical marker, and using something else as a
> conditional.  What do you think?
>
Well, as long as you can justify the origin of those forms, I'd say "anything
goes" ;)) . These are more stylistic decisions than questions about the
naturalisticness of things :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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