Re: Rejected posting to CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU

--- Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

> The language, unnamed as of yet, is based on Indo-European, Uralic (or at
> least
> Finno-Ugric) and Kartvelian.  Yukaghir may or may not be included, as is
> Samoyedic, the "black sheep" of the Uralic family.  The language is, like
> my
> version of Latin, is suffixal agglutinative with strict SOV word order.
> Features include a large number of noun cases (since Hungarian has
> seventeen,
> I
> expect a similar number), a polypersonal verb system (found in Hungarian
> and
> Georgian; the number and person of the direct object is encoded in the verb
> along with the subject -- even infinitives can bear an object marker!),
> animate-inanimate gender, singular-plural numeration, no vowel harmony, and
No vowel harmony, but there is ablaut which is mostly related to accent shifts
(e > o), where a dummy word, _pest_, would becomes _psot_.  Umlaut may occur,
where vowels are fronted due to influence of /i/ in an adjacent syllable, and
rounding due to a /u/ likewise.  That is, well, vowel harmony caused by umlaut.

(I posted earlier on Altaic vowel harmony being possibly related to
Indo-European ablaut.  What I should've said is that there are some parallels
of Turkic vowel harmony with Germanic ablaut -- you have fronted vowels, and
rounded vowels.  The "vowel cube" of Turkish I'll write about soon.

This is much more developed in Dragon -- a language spoken by radically
engineered humans with reptilian and piscine features -- which has an elaborate
system of vowel harmony, umlaut etc.

DaW.

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