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Re: Neimalu website

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Thursday, July 20, 2006, 19:27
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