Re: Delurking...

Hi!

John Vertical <johnvertical@...> writes:
>...
> original language, some of them have become quite mangled (eg 97: b'rk'li
> /b=.r`=k.'lI/, 106 sieboaRgi /siI.'boOR\.G\I/).
Could you give the phonotactics of that language?  Looks like fun.

> >Though many people here are linguists, many others are not. :-)  Any
> >many don't have concultures (e.g., me). :-)
>
> Well, I guess so... but from what I've read so far, it seemed to me
> that it was unusual to be both.
Hmm, no, not at all, I think.

> OK, maybe I've stared too much at the few "finished" ones, then.
Right, there are very few 'finished' ones.  And they are never
finished, of course. :-)

> >A lang where you can breathe through the nose while speaking would be
> >fun, too. ;-)
>
> The first one IS such! :b
:-)

> The phonemic inventory consists of five clicks (blb, dnt, alv, rfx,
> pal),
Are they modified in any way?  Clicks can be modified so nicely!
(But without pulmonic air...)

> a labiodental ejective fricative /f`/, and a weird rhotic
> sound which I cannot quite classify ("interdental unvoiced ejective
> asymmetric lateral fricative trill" could be a guess).
I think I know what you mean. :-)  But I cannot pronounce it quickly
enough to think of speaking words like that.

> Vowels:
> aeiou = /aEIOu\/. Long variants exist, too. These are not plain long vowels
> - I currently analyze them as diphthongs: /aV eE iI oO u\U/,
Quite strange, but does not even look too impossible...

>...
> Stops: /p t d k q G\/
> q tends to come out somewhat aspirated. /G\/ has an allophone /g/.
>...
> Nasals: m n N
> I originally had /N\/ too, but that has shrunk to the status of an allophone
> (appearing only before other uvulars.)
I did the same in Qthyn|gai.  The /N\/ was too hard to distinguish
from /N/ for me.  However, colloquial Kalaallisut seems to contrast
these two (and probably other langs).

> Grammatically, I'm going for a fairly noun-based system; there will only be
> a couple of auxiliary verbs, and all verbal constructs will need a further
> noun to describe the action itself (so each "verb" would seem like an
> idiom).  Simple relations, like identity or existence, will be expressable
> without verbs at all; most likely with conjunctions.
Please show us more as soon as you have more.  Looks like fun.  I like
noun based langs, too.  Two of my languages have no noun/verb
construction and my newest idea consists only of nouns, prepositions,
and serial 'verb' construction.

> This means that all verbal constructions will be at least transitive (and I
> wouldn't be surprized by eg. tetratransitives!)
That SVC based lang of mine will only have intransitives, if you
will. :-)

Limits:
> How does that work anyway? Does it give you an error message after a certain
> limit,
Yes, exactly.

> or just queue leftover messages for the next day?
No, they are just discarded.

> And while I'm at it, why isn't posting via yahoogroups allowed??
Because the Yahoo server is just a place to backup the postings.  The
primary server is at brown.edu.

**Henrik