> From: "M.S. Soderquist" <lilami@...>
> Subject: Conlangea Dreaming
>
> I had a dream last night that included some really strange hybrid of
> Spanish and English that was spoken in a lush island paradise ruled over
> by a queen named Lisabehtita,
[snip]
When I was younger we knew a lady at spanish church named "Beth" nicknamed
"Tita". Hmm.
> From: Irina Rempt <ira@...>
> Subject: Re: Conlangea Dreaming
>
> > ma buda luna-li-aneala...ma dita luna!
>
> Culi? Ce? Qué? Beth? In one word: What? The only thing I can
> understand is 'luna'.
Looks like "Fight language death... invent a language" to me.
> From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier <joerg.rhiemeier@...>
> Subject: anti-active case marking
>
> > > Another idea: an "anti-active" language. Active intransitive verbs
> > > (such as "to laugh") treat their subjects like direct objects,
> > > while non-active verbs (e.g. "to fall") like transitive subjects:
> > >
> > Hmm, quasi-ergative-ish. Actually my Hadwan will have started on the
> > road to ergativity this way, and although I hadn't thought of putting in
a
> > distinction between active/non-active use of I/II, it's an interesting
> > idea I may need to use...
>
> Why that way? The pattern I proposed is semantically absolutely
> implausible, and I never intended it to be anything else than a joke.
> I think it is a bad idea to use in a fictional natlang (i.e. in a
> language designed to represent a language that evolved naturally in a
> fictional world) because it is implausible.
Maybe I misunderstood you ("active" how exactly?). The way I read your idea
is something like what is doable in Spanish:
Me-II maté. "I killed myself."
Me-II reí. "I laughed."
Caí. "I fell."
There's not a rule _mandating_ those constructions--"reí" and "me caí" are
just as possible--but what's there to prevent there from being one?
---------
Ok...A lot of talk about "mora", reminds me of a similar kind of syllable
weighting in Hadwan.
Hadwan syllables are "light" if they end in a short vowel and/or a sonorant,
and "heavy" if they have a long vowel and/or end in an obstruent.
i-ni:-kus i-ni:-kum
L H H L H L
The stress on a noun stem is in a certain place (usually initial), but if a
heavy affix is added it "pulls" the stress towards it. (A heavy affix is
either a heavy syllable itself, an affix that makes the syllable it's added
to heavy, or a multi-syllabic affix.)
(íni:ku-) i-ní:-kus í-ni:-kum
On verbs the stress gets pulled to light affixes:
(zíma-) zí-mas zi-mám
(It's clunky!)
Hmm... I still need to figure out what conjugations really look like. Rf.
*Muke!
(who thinks this email should _not_ have taken four hours to write)
--
http://muke.twu.net/