Re: Essential Swedish?

From: "Trebor Jung" <treborjung@...>

> Polish is essentially Russian spoken by people who thought it was French
and
> had to sound awful.
I don't think it sounds awful at all! It does, however, seem to relate to
Russian as Moroccan Arabic relates to Standard Arabic. In other words,
tougher consonant clusters and fewer vowels.

But you wanna see a language with few vowels -- try Tamazight (Berber).
Especially the Shilha dialect of southern Morocco:

http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/~jcoleman/TPS.html
http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/papers/zaspil/articles/28-8-ridouane.pdf

> Georgian is essentially a hybrid of altered IE grammar and Arabic,
Persian,
> Turkish, and Russian vocabulary.
And a strange affinity for Basque grammar, only more polysynthetic.

> French is essentially Latin forced to comply with destructive sound
changes
> and German influence.
I always thought it was an attempt by the Dutch to speak a Romance language.

> Ithkuil is essentially an unending phonetic and grammatical nightmare
which
> attempts to combine all the world's natlangs together into one big stew of
> unlearnibility and unspeakibility.
Sounds like my conlang, called Tech in English, _le teque_ in French, and
_at'-t'aq_ in Arabic. The name comes from the root *t'aq'- meaning "hidden,
occult". It's the language of a superhuman, pre-Adamic race known as the
Techians, which can be described as a mix of demigods, elves,
Vulcans/Romulans, jinn, fallen angels, demons and d(a)evas/devils. It was
taught to the first humans tens of thousands years ago, spoken as late as
the Flood and Babel, but later mangled, dumbed-down and dissimilated by
human nations -- partly by God's hand, partly by human's rebellion against
the arrogant tyrants. Ridiculously complex in phonology and grammar.

Vocabulary is derived from Nostratic, the dubious ancestor of Indo-European,
Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian (South Caucasian), Uralic, Altaic,
(Elamo-)Dravidian, Sumerian and Eskimo-Aleut; words are also taken from
these families themselves. There may be a future influx of
Sino-Dene-Caucasian in the future.

This project has literally taken me nearly two decades and has been
abandoned and restarted many times. Phonology alone took me way too long.
Right now I'm piecing together a lexicon with three- and four-consonant
roots.

And by the way, yes I'm back. Still in Texas, but my wife and I are finally
settling in Maryland this summer, if all goes well....

Reply