Re: Neimalu website

Hi!

Pieterson writes:
> I've copied some of my notes from my conlang Neimalu and put it on line:
> http://pieterson.atspace.com. At first I wrote it for private use so it's in
> Dutch only.
>
> I'd appreciate comments.
Quite elaborated!

I read that several suffixes have more than one form, also, some seem
to have some kind of umlaut in their case forms.  Are there abstract
rules for this?  Vowel harmony, etc.?  Did I miss anything?

And what is the overall design goal?  It looks quite similar in
structure to my Fukhian, but more elaborated.

To comment on the phonology: the normal vowels I found very
straightforwardly constructed (three-levels in height, front, back,
and the front high vowels exist both rounded and unrounded).  When
reading about the diphthongs, however, I felt a strange mismatch that
the language has both /ej/ and /Ej/.  Why is that so?  In contrast to
the monophthongs, this is a very subtle distinction (and most
foreigners, e.g. me, don't learn this easily when trying to learn
Dutch).

Wrt. the cases: there is ablative and 'ellative' (what does the case
name derive from?).  How is a locative expressed?  By a preposition?
The case system seems to be quite similar to my Fukhian, there is even
the predicative case.  I did not split the genitive though, and had a
locative (and the case names are slightly different, but very similar
in usage).

Of course, I like the evidenciality markers.  Very handy. :-)

Is the lexicon completely a priori?  It seems like a posteriori
sometimes ('préne' < frz. 'prendre'?).

Apart from the grammar itself, I found reading it in Dutch
entertaining because of the Germanic linguistic terminology that
German uses Latin for.  It's a quiz for Germans.  I knew some words,
but sometimes it was a challenge to guess what something meant (e.g.
wederkerende/wederkerig/betrekkelijk voornaamwoord).  And then using
Dutch abbreviations is also fun (e.g. for nom, acc, dat, the tables
are sometimes labelled O, LV, MV).  I like Dutch for this. :-)

BTW, I think in 5.2.1, the third example sentence seems to lack the
translation of 'will autorijden'.

**Henrik