Re: Mandarin pronouns (ta1) [Was: a question about names]

Roger Mills wrote:

> Stephen Mulraney wrote:
> Very interesting. Since I've just been working on Gwr, a language of similar
> type (except I know nothing of Mandarin), I'm struck by the more than
> occasional resemblances.
Ah, that's what kind of a thing Gwr is; I wasn't sure. Actually, if you're
not familiar with Mandarin, I expect Gwr will be quite different (ie. more
interesting?) from Tiemish, simply because Tiemish shamelessly lifts everything
from Mandarin, except in the rare cases where I have an original idea (ie. one
lifted from a language other than Mandarin). Tiemish is a really desperate
attempt to finally produce a halfway complete conlang :).


> Tonogenesis is a problem; I know some of the principles, but need to find
> good sources for some of the subtleties.  I note that in Tiemish, tone seems
> to be determined by the _coda_; do the initials have no affect?
No, they don't. That in itself doesn't seem too strange to me, but outside of
certain rules of thumb (eg. voiceless codas tend to give rise to high tones)
and sanity checks (e.g. the contemporary codas -r -l -m -n -N and their
syllabic equivilants, transcribed -re -le -me -ne -nge, come from historic
-r -l -m -n -N, respectively), the details of the tonogenesis process are
more or less arbitrary, and guided by the principle of having roughly the
desired proportions of each coda in the contemporary lang.

So, I haven't been worried about subtleties: this language mainly exists in
order to become fodder for sound-changes. My past experience with
only-slightly-elaborated conlangs (Tetelgen, especially, though Ligutniis`at
was even less elaborated) suggests that I need more than just vocab - I need
extensive texts - in order to produce interesting children. With only vocab,
I can produce reflexes of individual words, but can't necessarily develop the
syntax in any way short of reinventing it.



> The proto sound system was: p t k q, b d g, m n N, w r l y s h, Vowels i a
> u. All C could occur as initial, medial, final.
> This developed to modern BD:  p t ts tr tS k q, b d dz dl dZ g, f s S x, w l
> y s h, Vowels i e E/& 1 a u o O and vocalic r [3^]. The only codas are ? N h
> w y
Very nice - I like the glottal stops, and the [3^] (very Mandarin! Or at least, Beijing).


> Sample (easy!) derivations:
>
> *pátV > **pat > pa? high tone
> *pVtá > **(p)ta > ta high
>
> *bátV > **bat > ba? low
> *bVtá > **(b)ta > ta low (alternative? da high?)
Another similar with Tiemish, here (though it's only briefly mentioned on the
page). At least, many compounds will give clusters like 'pt' etc. I guess this
will happen when a modifier-modified compound undergoes syncope of the first
syllable, while non-syncoping groups will occur when things get suffixed onto
the head. Needs lots of thought, though. In particular, I expect the common
enough use of classifiers *after* the noun (with indefinite force) will give rise
to common noun-endings in the daughter langs.


> Well, I need to get this organized a lot more before creating a web page.
I look forward to reading more :).

The web page for Tiemish is more or less a copy of my working document (hence
the struck-though paragraphs, etc). I usually get inspired on paper, and work
out details on computer.


s.
--
Stephen Mulraney        ataltane@ataltane.net        http://ataltane.net
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.