Re: Language sketch -- Lassaptakl

>From: Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
>Old Lassaptakl was apparently an isolating language with word order SVO;
>modern Lassaptakl, however, is an inflecting-agglutinating language with
>word order VSO.  Most of the inflections consist of particles being
>reinterpreted as parts of words -- hence most inflections are prefixed to
>the word in question, with a few exceptions.
Independent words becoming bound morphemes.  Could explain the origin of
languages in general!  My studies on Nostratic and other things lead me to
believe that, if you believe in linguistic monogenesis from Babel,
inflecting languages evolved from agglutinating languages.  Nostratic's
offspring, as is commonly believed, are majority agglutinative (Uralic,
Ket-Yukaghir, Altaic, Dravidian, Kartvelian, and possibly Inuit-Aleut), with
the two inflecting exceptions, Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European.  The
inflecting languages seem to have come from agglutinative, since Nostratic
was probably agglutinating and suffix-based.  So if you can connect
Nostratic with, say, Sino-Tibetan, you could come up with an isolating
ancestor.  But that's way back, I mean tens of thousands of years before the
present age.  That's pretty scary if you ask me.

However, it could work the other way -- English is mostly isolating, but Old
English is highly inflecting!  Farsi/Persian is more agglutinative than
inflecting, even borrowing elements from Turkish.

I'm rambling too much here, so back to the post.

>The Sullamal are essentially nomadic in nature, although they claim their
>homeland in Tibet.  Their mythical homeland is called Sampala, and some
>commentators have suggested that this is the Shambhala of legend.  There
>is no evidence for this, nor is there any evidence that the Sullamal have
>their origins in Tibet.  Although their language borrows freely from
>English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and even, apparently, Latin, it
>appears to be unrelated to any living language.
Sounds a lot like the Roma (Gypsies).  We only recently figured out they
came from northern India, not Egypt or wherever.  Romani, alongside Urdu,
English and Hungarian, have probably borrowed more words from more languages
than any other known.

And of course you have Chinese words in Korean and Japanese -- Japanese has
gone as far to develop an inherent diglossia, with most words having a _kun_
form and an _on_ form.  Now which one is native Japanese, and the other
Sino-Japanese?

>a  a in father
>i  i in machine
>u  u in blue
[...]

>p        pronounced /p/ when initial; voiced when followed or proceeded by
>l or
>when intervocalic unless doubled.
>
>t        pronounced /t/ when initial; voiced when followed or proceeded by
>l or
>when intervocalic unless doubled.
>
>c        pronounced /k/ when initial; voiced when followed or proceeded by
>l or
>when intervocalic unless doubled.
>
>s        pronounced /s/ when initial; voiced when followed or proceeded by
>l or
>when intervocalic unless doubled.
>
>m       pronounced /m/ when intial or followed by [p].  When followed by
>[t]
>pronounced /n/.  When followed by [c] pronounced /ng/.
>
>l       pronounced /l/.
You know, a language with a small number of phonemes such as that could have
a ton of allophones, if you decide to develop the language further.  Tamil,
for example, has for the letter /t/:

Initial: [t]
Medial: [D]
Before nasal: [d]
Doubled: [t:]

You might have a [T] in there somewhere...

For your language, stops could not only be voiced; they can become
fricatives, say, in a word like _apa_, you might have [aBa] (B = bilabial
v).  /l/ could have the allophone [r] intervocally, and /s/ could be [h] in
certain circumstances.  You could also develop vowel allophones [e] and [o]
from unstressed diphthongs, and unstressed /a/ could be [@], or you could
even go as far as to make unstressed short [i] and [u] disappear altogether,
making preceding consonants palatized or velarized.  I'm thinking of
Japanese /si/ > [S], /tu/ > [ts], /hu/ > [P] (bilabial f).  (I forgot the
SAMPA symbol for "phi".)

Your system is quite efficient anyhow.

I'd respond further if I had more time...

Danny
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