Wednesday, August 28, 2002

I still don't know what I'm going to do with Rami. I still want it to be a radically different kind of language, which means it will take a lot of careful thought to build it with (without) the concepts I need to leave out of it...

I read about oligosynthesis on CONLANG, maybe I'll quietly incorporate something like that.

Oh well, I guess I'd better get cracking.

Muke Tever 6:45 PM

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Friday, August 16, 2002

One of my Bosnian-English dictionaries is a little crypto-eccentric. For example, fire is glossed as vatra, but fire!! (with two exclamation marks...) is požar!!

...

Sihler's book says that Old Irish had suppletive infinitives, like gal as the infinitive for fichid "fights".

I want to see more suppletive miratives...

Muke Tever 9:50 PM

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Tuesday, August 13, 2002

And I still want to make a conlang based on Natural Semantic Metalanguage primitives...

Muke Tever 8:58 AM

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I wanted to make a con-PIE. I know I would start out with a phonology something like this...

Traditional voiced aspirated stops are voiced stops. Trad'tl voiceless stops remain voiceless. Trad'tl voiced stops are voiced fricatives. (This makes me feel better about reconstructions like *pd-os.) There is a full set of voiceless fricatives, them being *f, *s, *š, *x/*h (trad'tl H₂), *x^w/h^w (trad'tl H₃). *f and *θ are just there to make me feel better. Trad'tl *b (our *β) becomes *w—we will reconstruct some *w but not sure which. *š is the consonant that becomes *y everywhere but in Greek, where it becomes ζ—e.g., in *šeuγ- (*yeug-).

Trad'tl H₁ remains 1. I have an idea that it is the remnant of a former *y (with trad't *y being, perhaps, from *H, i.e., front rounded semivowel), but whatever it was, it was already lost by the time of my con-PIE so 1 is more the idea of a laryngeal—and when *x and *x^w disappear, they disappear along the same pattern.

The voiced fricatives eventually become stops (as per trad.), and the vl. frics. voice, doing *f > *w, *θ > ?, *x > *γ as H₂, and *x^w > *γ^w as H₃.

(Do we know whether Hittite h's were voiced or not?)

Remind me to think more on this later...

Muke Tever 8:52 AM

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If the feminine of *k^wetwur-, *k^wetwores is *k^wetesr-, which *-esr- Watkins traces to the zero grade of *esor-, "woman", does anything prevent the *-ur- of the masculine from being from *wer-, "man" ?

Muke Tever 8:34 AM

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Monday, August 12, 2002

Remind me to put desideratives in Trentish.

Muke Tever 11:42 AM

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I am in the middle of reading Sihler's New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Now, since Greek and Latin are not particularly related outside of PIE... well! This book is principally about Proto-Indo-European.

A nice big thick book. Pages and pages after headings like "Distribution of the PIE ablaut grades" and "Survey of the PIE verb system". Thick and chunky. Mmmm...

Needless to say a few Hadwan bits will want severious rethinking :p

Muke Tever 11:35 AM

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This page is interesting even if its facts are true and even though its premise is ... farfetched.