Re: GSF revisited

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 5/6/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
[snip]
>> Re-reading the GSF thread it is apparent to me that one of the problems
>> that caused the thread to peter out was that we were trying to encompass
>> both a "ancient Greek without flexions" and a "modern Greek without
>> flexions,"
>
>
> partly because MG had already adopted a couple of the deflexions
> suggested for GSF (e.g. a synthetic future, or basing
> ex-third-declension noun forms on the accusative singular).
Yes, I think was done early on, but as the thread developed the
difficulties of the dual approach became more apparent to me. The result
wasn't one thing or another.

[snip]
> Part of that was on purpose or through conscious decisions, part of it
> was simply how the language ended up -- I had the feeling that I
> partly discovered, rather than created, GSF. Does anyone else get that
> feeling sometimes with their conlangs?
Oh yes, JRRT clearly did. I'm not sure that I would say I have
discovering Piashi (BrSc), but the language has taken on a character of
its own which is quite different from what I had expected. Maybe that's
why I'm now having problems with the lexicon - I'm expecting one thing
and it'll probably turn out quite differently one day. But back to FG.......

[snip]
>> the
>> vocabulary is almost entirely Greek, but the language becomes
>> flexionless à la chinoise.
>
> So, not even a plural?
No - not at present. I'll certainly resist given FG even the few verb
flexions that the misnamed 'Latino sine flexione' has.

>> During the Koine the pitch accent gave way to a stress
>> accent. This happened also in FG, and the place of the stress is shown
>> by a dash above the vowel which we can conveniently represent by the
>> acute accent.
>
> This also has the advantage that font support will be better --
> presuming you'll be using the Unicode characters with "tonos" rather
> than specifically the precomposed ones with "oxia".
Exactly   :)

[snip]
>> NOUNS
>> Peano's idea was to use the noun stem in 'Latino sine flexione.' In this
>> Latin made things easy for him, you just use the old ablative singular!
>> To make things even easier, dictionaries give the nominative and
>> genitive forms for nouns, and the correct ablative ending can always be
>> derived correctly from the genitive. Ancient Greek does not make things
>> so easy    :)
>
> No? Is the accusative not easily derivable from the genitive?
Not as straightforward as deriving the Latin ablative from the genitive.
[snip]

>> At present I am considering using the accusative singular, dropping a
>> final -N if there is one, for all nouns, whether 1st, 2nd or 3rd
>> declension and whatever their grammatical gender
>
> What are you going to be doing about neuter nouns of the third declension?
>
> Using the accusative singular means that nouns will nearly always end
> in a vowel, *except* for those pesky third neuters, which end in
> things such as -s (e.g. pho:s pho:tos, pathos pathous, kreas kreatos)
> or -r (e.g. pyr pyros, he:par he:patos).
Φως  κρέας  πυρ and ήπαρ don't bother me. But I must confess I am not
altogether happy with those neuters in -ος.  Dictionaries give the
genitive of  πάθεος (πάθους is a contracted form). Could one take the
genitive for the 3rd declension nouns, and remove the final -ς?

That would generally give a form identical to that which the noun would
take as the first part of a compound. But it would mean that "city"
becomes πόλεω [sic] (rather than πόλι), "ship" becomes νεώ (rather than
ναυ [naw]) and "ox" becomes the somewhat awkward βοό (rather than the
more euphonious and somewhat onomatopoeic βου [bu]).

Umm - need to think about this.
===================================

And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
 > When is FG itself spoken? How much time has elapsed since it split from
 > Greek (or since it creolized)?

I had sort of though in terms of FG still being spoken - it split of
from contact with the rest of the Greek speaking world in the early 1st
cent CE. As to when it was creolized, I don't know. To be honest, I
haven't thought the ccnhistory through. It may be in the end I have to
admit the scenario is not plausible    :(

====================================

T. A. McLeay wrote:
 > R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
 > ...
 >
 >>(a) retaining the ancient pronunciation.
 >>(b) treating rather like B, Δ, Γ, that is the are aspirated voiceless
 >>plosives when initial or after nasals, but voiceless fricatives elsewhere
 >>(Φ of course being a _bilabial_ fricative).
 >>(c) a modification of (b) in which the aspirate has given way to a
 >>fricative, thus giving rise an affricate sound  /pf tT kX/ when initial
 >>or after a nasal, and a simple voiceless fricative elsewhere - in (c) the
 >>fricative pronunciation of  Φ will be [f].
 >>(d) using the Byzantine & modern pronunciation.
 >
 >
 > If you’re taking suggestions,

I'm most certainly taking suggestions - the more the better    ;)

 > I think Chinese is believed to have had
 > aspirated voiceless stops for a very long time. Perhaps this is an
 > argument for (a)?

I had thought of that. But Chinese also has [ff] and [x]. Are these also
ancient? And it depends really at what stage in its development
'proto-FG'  met other central/ eastern Asian langs (and, indeed, which
langs).
=====================================

andrew wrote:
[snip]
 > If their conhistory is Central Asian then there is the possibility that
 > their script would flip so it is written down the page instead of
 > across it.  That would add a challenge for people who design
 > conscripts, and add grief to the rest of us :)

Interesting idea. A cursive script git flipped round. It's a thought. I
think it would be an alternative script, however, and it does rather
remove the language from Greek more than I intended.

Ray
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