Re: GSF revisited

On 5/6/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> Philip's recent mails on GSF caused to revisit the GSF thread of Feb.
> 2006 and got me thinking once again what flexionless Greek might look
> like. I note that today (6th may) Philip has written:
> "I also think I'm going to embrace the origin of GSF in Modern, rather
> than Ancient, Greek, and replace some of the AG words I put in with MG
> ones, since they're really only a token attempt to make it more
> AG-like...."
>
> 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).

> and falling between the two. Philip is far more familiar with
> the modern language than I am
... and you are far more familiar with the ancient language than I am.

I noticed that while I tried to include elements of AG, the language
ended up being predominated by MG influence.

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?

> What I had been thinking about in the past two or three days was a
> strictly _ancient_ Greek without flexions. I feel Philip's statement
> leaves the way clear for me,
By all means!

I realised more and more that I wasn't going to produce anything
remotely like a flexionless *A*G, and would be interested to see what
others more qualified than I am can do in that direction.

> I consider my proposal to be complementary to his, not a rival.
So do I. (FWIW.)

> the
> vocabulary is almost entirely Greek, but the language becomes
> flexionless à la chinoise.
So, not even a plural?

> 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". (The official
shape of the tonos in MG is, apparently, the acute, but fonts differ
as to the exact appearance; vertical lines or wedges are also seen,
especially in fonts that predate the [1982, IIRC] promulgation of the
"official" shape of the monotonic tonos.)

> 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? (Except
for third-declension monosyllables, which have final stress in the
genitive but initial stress in the accusative, off the top of my head
I'd have thought you could derive acc.sg. easily from gen.sg.)

> 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).

Which was bad in my case because it makes it hard to tack on the
plural morpheme -s onto those. If you have no plural, that might not
be a problem, but I'm just mentioning it in case you'd like to have
universal vowel endings for other reasons (say, aesthetics, or effect
on following words such as postpositions, or whatever).

> More to come     :)
Excellent!

Mena efciþi kalo tici ke epiticia se sena!

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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