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Re: First Post and Proto-Conlang rough sketch

From:Jason Monti <yukatado@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 14, 2007, 10:04
Okay, I was thinking about instead of limiting compounds to
O-grade+Zero-grade, to allowing for Zero+E-grade for a word-class distinction.

For example, to follow the way English does things in the word "record":

A "REcord" is something that you can play on a turntable,

but

I can "reCORD" someone's voice.

So what I would like to do is, given two roots:

*piet and *gerts:

Nouns: piotgrts ['pjot,gr=ts] OR gortspit ['gorts,pit] (not ['gort,spIt])

Verbs: pitgerts [pit'gerts] OR grtspiet [gr=ts'pjet]

I'm also reading up on creole grammars to find out what kinds of things they
do. I realize already that just the small level of morphology I have here is
quite divergent from the fairly non morphological creoles, but at this stage
in the proto-language, perhaps I would like to retain a few features, like
if a creole from the ancient past has changed a bit over time giving rise to
this strange e/o/0-grade system.

Finally, I want to make this an active/stative language like PIE was at its
earlier stages (at least, according to the FAQ on Zompist) such that
inanimate objects cannot be the subjects of sentences but that a
grammaticallized and eventually fused mass-noun particle will give rise to a
"feminine" whence there was only "masculine" and "neuter" (active/stative).

I'm still rather conflicted over making it SOV or SVO, but my knowledge of
PIE (what little of it there is) and my experience with Japanese tell me
that starting out with SOV seems the best way to go.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Reply

Joseph Fatula <joefatula@...>