There are 10 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

1a. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: Leonardo Castro
1b. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: J. 'Mach' Wust
1c. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1d. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: Elena ``of Valhalla''
1e. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: BPJ
1f. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: Sam Stutter
1g. Re: Rolling your R's    
    From: Elena ``of Valhalla''

2a. Re: Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time    
    From: Padraic Brown

3a. Re: Creoles    
    From: Padraic Brown

4a. How Mentolatian Whisks Away All its Consonants    
    From: Padraic Brown


Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" leolucas1...@gmail.com 
    Date: Wed Jul 17, 2013 1:46 pm ((PDT))

My native dialect doesn't have alveolar trills, but pt-BR does have
them in some accents. I find it easy to pronounce (bilabiar trill is
far more difficult), but many of my relatives are unable to pronounce
the alveolar trill.

I wonder how common it is for people to be unable to pronounce sounds
of other accents of their own language...

Até mais!

Leonardo


2013/7/17 H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx>:
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 02:36:33PM -0500, Adam Walker wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 2:15 PM, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > I see. There's also the bilabial trill [B\] in IPA; are there actually
>> > any languages that use that phonemically??
>> >
>> >
>> I believe Bai has this sound.  At least I have a vague memory of Jerry
>> Edmonson so claiming.
> [...]
>
> Hmm, interesting. This inspired me to google for it, and after some
> effort I found some references to Nias Selatan, an Austronesian language
> in which [B\] appears to be a phoneme (though there is some controversy
> about it). In other languages, it seems that [B\] only appears as an
> allophone of some other underlying phonemes.
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 02:55:34PM -0500, George Corley wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 2:15 PM, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>>
>> > On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 06:58:43PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
>> > > It seems like you might be producing a voiceless _retroflex_
>> > > trill? It is sort of like pushing your tongue forward from its
>> > > curled position by a puff of air (with maybe some frication in the
>> > > throat - don't quote me, I'm not a phonetician). Otherwise it's
>> > > probably a voiceless alveolar or voiceless uvular trill.
>> >
>> > Well, I doubt it's a retroflex trill, 'cos I can't curl my tongue.
>> > :)
>> >
>> >
>> You don't actually have to curl your tongue back to produce a
>> retroflex -- it's a bit of a misnomer. A retroflex is really just the
>> tip of your tongue articulating on a point just behind the alveolar
>> ridge. Xrays have shown "retroflex" consonants pronounced just by
>> pulling the tongue body back far enough to make it, with no curling.
>
> Oh? In that case, that sounds closer to what I'm pronouncing.
>
> Is it similar enough to the alveolar trill that perhaps, hopefully, I'll
> be able to transfer over? Or is it still no cigar for getting closer to
> the Russian [r]/[r_j] contrast?
>
> On another note, are there any languages that use actual curling of the
> tongue in a phoneme? That might be interesting conlang material. :)
>
>
> T
>
> --
> "I'm not childish; I'm just in touch with the child within!" - RL





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "J. &#39;Mach&#39; Wust" j_mach_w...@shared-files.de 
    Date: Wed Jul 17, 2013 1:59 pm ((PDT))

On Wed, 17 Jul 2013 10:59:52 +0200, taliesin the storyteller 
<taliesin-conl...@nvg.org> wrote:

>On 2013-07-17 09:18, BPJ wrote:
>> I guess you can coarticulate a uvular and an alveolar trill/fricative but
>> I'd guess that you're just pronouncing a voiceless uvular trill. A
>> forcefully articulated /X/ easily becomes trilled. You should rather easily
>> feel if the uvula is vibrating; it kind of bubbles in your throat.
>
>.. like gargling water without the water, really.

It might also be an epiglottal trill, though. I imagine that for someone who
couldn't pronounce either before, the uvular and the epiglottal trill might
feel very similar. I have a hard time producing an epiglottal trill, but I can
distinguish it from the uvular trill since that one, I can pronounce reliably
(though not very naturally). So when I produce something different
vibrating even further back and down than the uvula, I am pretty sure it
must be the epiglottis. Most of the times I try producing that trill, it just
gargles, but sometimes, I get a very distinct trill.

-- 
grüess
mach





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
1c. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com 
    Date: Wed Jul 17, 2013 2:17 pm ((PDT))

On 17 July 2013 21:15, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> Hehe, OK. I should look that up online when I get home. :)
>
> I think I can now identify the uvular trill (at least when I'm saying it
> myself). Like others have said, it's like gargling without water. A
> French oral tradition, perhaps? :-P :-P
>
>
Okay, I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I guess I have to since this
bit of misinformation keeps coming back on the list: The French rhotic is
normally *not* an uvular trill [ʀ]. It's an uvular *fricative* [ʁ] in most
of the country (well, that or an approximant. Somehow the IPA uses the same
symbol for both), and an alveolar trill [r] in some Southern accents. The
uvular trill exists only in the speech of *some* Parisians (of whom Edith
Piaf was the most well known), and it's an accent that is strongly decried,
and made fun of, by the rest of France. In any case, it's not a sound you
should use as a foreigner to speak French, as people may take it as if you
were making fun of them (it *is* jarring). The uvular fricative is far
easier to pronounce, so if you want to speak French I'd advise you to focus
on that one anyway :) .

That said, if you just want to learn to pronounce and recognise uvular
trills just for the sake of it, knock yourself out with Piaf, she's got
very strong ones!


>
> [...]
> > Do y'all have trouble pronouncing trills? And if not, what kind of
> > trill(s) can you pronounce, and how?
> > ==================================
> > RM Try as I might, I cannot produce the uvular trill of Parisian
> > French (except when gargling ;-(((( )  though I can do uvular stops
> > and fricatives without a problem.
>

Strangely enough, I have no problem pronouncing uvular trills, fricatives
and approximants, but have a hard time with uvular stops.


> When I try to "sound French (or
> > German)", my r's usually come out as a velar fricative.
>
> German has the uvular trill too?
>
>
It has [r], [ʁ] and [ʀ] in free variation for a single /r/ phoneme, mostly
depending on dialect I believe. I have no idea which is the more common.

Some Dutch dialects also have the uvular trill as realisation of their
rhotic phoneme. And then there's the infamous "kinderen-voor-kinderen r",
which is pronounced as an uvular trill word-initially, and
syllable-initially after a consonant, and as an alveolar approximant in
coda position or between vowels. Some people affect that pronunciation to
sound "posh", but to me it just sounds like they're trying too much. I
myself use an alveolar flap/trill, but that's because my first exposition
to Dutch was through its Southern dialects :) .


>
> > OTOH I've never had any trouble with the alveolar trill/tap in
> > Spanish, Italian or Indonesian..... go figure !!
>
> You've no idea how happy I am to have discovered how to pronounce
> trills, however imperfect it may be at the moment... my entire childhood
> of exposure to Malay and being unable to trill my /r/'s, and then
> learning Russian in my adulthood and *still* being unable to trill my
> /r/'s.
>
>
When I first started learning Spanish, something like 22 years ago, I
despaired of ever getting both its rhotics right. The flap was relatively
easy. But the trill mystified me. Until I somehow got it one day (after
repeating about a thousand times "el perro de San Roque no tiene rabo"!).
Since then I never forgot it. Trilling is like biking: after you learn it
you never forget :) . Actually, it went so far that when I got the trill
right I somehow lost the ability to make correct flaps (I would trill them
too much), and I had to relearn to make flaps! :P

The trick that did it for me, IIRC, was to stop focussing on tongue
movement and start focussing on my breath. Alveolar trills are not produced
by consciously moving your tongue, but rather by placing your tongue in the
right position, relaxing its tip, and letting the air flow do the work for
you. The difficult part is relaxing the tongue just enough. Relaxing it too
much will result in not much of anything, while not relaxing it enough will
produce a fricative. There's a kind of Goldilocks zone of relaxation when
it comes to trills :P.


> (I'm hoping that I'll be able to master [r] in the near future, so that
> I can start working on the [r]/[r_j] contrast in Russian, which I had no
> hope of before. Right now my trills require such specific configurations
> that attempting to palatize them just doesn't work. How do those Russian
> kids do it?!... OTOH, I'm partially comforted by the fact that Vladimir
> Lenin himself had trouble with /r/. :-P)
>
>
Palatalised trills are easy enough. My own problem is being unable to
distinguish alveolo-palatal fricatives from postalveolar ones!
-- 
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
1d. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "Elena ``of Valhalla&#39;&#39;" elena.valha...@gmail.com 
    Date: Thu Jul 18, 2013 12:56 am ((PDT))

On 2013-07-17 at 17:45:53 -0300, Leonardo Castro wrote:
> My native dialect doesn't have alveolar trills, but pt-BR does have
> them in some accents. I find it easy to pronounce (bilabiar trill is
> far more difficult), but many of my relatives are unable to pronounce
> the alveolar trill.
> 
> I wonder how common it is for people to be unable to pronounce sounds
> of other accents of their own language...

I can't pronounce the alveolar trill, as well, and it is a sound 
in what is supposed to be my own accent of Italian.

I believe this case is quite common: it has a popular name (erre moscia) 
and a page on the italian and spanish wikipedias:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotacismo_(medicina)
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotacismo

(which btw are a bit catastrophists: social reclusion as a result? 
at least here in Italy once you get to high school it becomes 
a non-issue.)

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
1e. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se 
    Date: Thu Jul 18, 2013 3:30 am ((PDT))

2013-07-18 09:56, Elena ``of Valhalla'' skrev:
> On 2013-07-17 at 17:45:53 -0300, Leonardo Castro wrote:
>> My native dialect doesn't have alveolar trills, but pt-BR does have
>> them in some accents. I find it easy to pronounce (bilabiar trill is
>> far more difficult), but many of my relatives are unable to pronounce
>> the alveolar trill.
>>
>> I wonder how common it is for people to be unable to pronounce sounds
>> of other accents of their own language...
>
> I can't pronounce the alveolar trill, as well, and it is a sound
> in what is supposed to be my own accent of Italian.

So what *do* you pronounce? An uvular trill/fricative/approximant
or an alveolar fricative/approximant?

I'm in fact a speaker of two somewhat different Swedish
accents/dialects, one of them having [ɾ]/[r] as a simple/geminate
pair and the other [ɾ]/[r]/[ɻ] in rather free variation. The
interesting thing is that [É»] is an innovation; I can still
remember a time when I didn't use it, and younger speakers of
either of my accents have only [É»], so I'm conservative! There
have always been some speakers of Gothenburg Swedish who used
uvular /r/ as an individual trait; apparently it runs in
families, so there may be a physiological difficulty pronouncing
alveolar/retroflex rhotics for some. I don't normally speak with
[ʀ] or [ʁ] but I have never had any difficulty pronouncing and
using either even before I studied phonetics. I had a
kindergarten teacher from Denmark when I was 2-3 y.o. and I could
do a fabulous imitation of her accent, or so they say. I can
produce an epiglottal trill, and I use it when imitating a dog's
growling, but I can't use it in speech.

>
> I believe this case is quite common: it has a popular name (erre moscia)
> and a page on the italian and spanish wikipedias:
>
> https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotacismo_(medicina)
> https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotacismo

I would have expected 'rotacismo' to denote a replacement of /z/
or /l/ with a rhotic -- that's what it usually means in
historical linguistics.

>
> (which btw are a bit catastrophists: social reclusion as a result?
> at least here in Italy once you get to high school it becomes
> a non-issue.)

It's a bit like having [ʃ] instead of [x]/[χ] in Gothenburg. You
are sure to get teased for it at school, at least if you're a
boy, but people grow up. As a woman it may actually get worse as
you grow older, as [ʃ] is perceived as a snobbish 'lady in fur
coat' trait.

2013-07-17 14:18, Roger Mills skrev:
> RM Try as I might, I cannot produce the uvular trill of
> Parisian French (except when gargling ;-(((( ) though I can do
> uvular stops and fricatives without a problem. When I try to
> "sound French (or German)", my r's usually come out as a velar
> fricative. OTOH I've never had any trouble with the alveolar
> trill/tap in Spanish, Italian or Indonesian..... go figure !!

No worries. Most Germans and French actually use a fricative! My
only problem in this department is that [É»] may sneak in instead
of [r] when I try to speak Finnish or Italian.

/bpj





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
1f. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "Sam Stutter" samjj...@gmail.com 
    Date: Thu Jul 18, 2013 3:43 am ((PDT))

The amount of times I hear English people attempting to do Edith Piaf style 
accents and thinking it's great French! Am I right when I tell them that 
they're doing the French equivalent of Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins? 

On 17 Jul 2013, at 22:17, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <tsela...@gmail.com> 
wrote:

> On 17 July 2013 21:15, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
>> Hehe, OK. I should look that up online when I get home. :)
>> 
>> I think I can now identify the uvular trill (at least when I'm saying it
>> myself). Like others have said, it's like gargling without water. A
>> French oral tradition, perhaps? :-P :-P
>> 
>> 
> Okay, I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I guess I have to since this
> bit of misinformation keeps coming back on the list: The French rhotic is
> normally *not* an uvular trill [ʀ]. It's an uvular *fricative* [ʁ] in most
> of the country (well, that or an approximant. Somehow the IPA uses the same
> symbol for both), and an alveolar trill [r] in some Southern accents. The
> uvular trill exists only in the speech of *some* Parisians (of whom Edith
> Piaf was the most well known), and it's an accent that is strongly decried,
> and made fun of, by the rest of France. In any case, it's not a sound you
> should use as a foreigner to speak French, as people may take it as if you
> were making fun of them (it *is* jarring). The uvular fricative is far
> easier to pronounce, so if you want to speak French I'd advise you to focus
> on that one anyway :) .
> 
> That said, if you just want to learn to pronounce and recognise uvular
> trills just for the sake of it, knock yourself out with Piaf, she's got
> very strong ones!
> 
> 
>> 
>> [...]
>>> Do y'all have trouble pronouncing trills? And if not, what kind of
>>> trill(s) can you pronounce, and how?
>>> ==================================
>>> RM Try as I might, I cannot produce the uvular trill of Parisian
>>> French (except when gargling ;-(((( )  though I can do uvular stops
>>> and fricatives without a problem.
>> 
> 
> Strangely enough, I have no problem pronouncing uvular trills, fricatives
> and approximants, but have a hard time with uvular stops.
> 
> 
>> When I try to "sound French (or
>>> German)", my r's usually come out as a velar fricative.
>> 
>> German has the uvular trill too?
>> 
>> 
> It has [r], [ʁ] and [ʀ] in free variation for a single /r/ phoneme, mostly
> depending on dialect I believe. I have no idea which is the more common.
> 
> Some Dutch dialects also have the uvular trill as realisation of their
> rhotic phoneme. And then there's the infamous "kinderen-voor-kinderen r",
> which is pronounced as an uvular trill word-initially, and
> syllable-initially after a consonant, and as an alveolar approximant in
> coda position or between vowels. Some people affect that pronunciation to
> sound "posh", but to me it just sounds like they're trying too much. I
> myself use an alveolar flap/trill, but that's because my first exposition
> to Dutch was through its Southern dialects :) .
> 
> 
>> 
>>> OTOH I've never had any trouble with the alveolar trill/tap in
>>> Spanish, Italian or Indonesian..... go figure !!
>> 
>> You've no idea how happy I am to have discovered how to pronounce
>> trills, however imperfect it may be at the moment... my entire childhood
>> of exposure to Malay and being unable to trill my /r/'s, and then
>> learning Russian in my adulthood and *still* being unable to trill my
>> /r/'s.
>> 
>> 
> When I first started learning Spanish, something like 22 years ago, I
> despaired of ever getting both its rhotics right. The flap was relatively
> easy. But the trill mystified me. Until I somehow got it one day (after
> repeating about a thousand times "el perro de San Roque no tiene rabo"!).
> Since then I never forgot it. Trilling is like biking: after you learn it
> you never forget :) . Actually, it went so far that when I got the trill
> right I somehow lost the ability to make correct flaps (I would trill them
> too much), and I had to relearn to make flaps! :P
> 
> The trick that did it for me, IIRC, was to stop focussing on tongue
> movement and start focussing on my breath. Alveolar trills are not produced
> by consciously moving your tongue, but rather by placing your tongue in the
> right position, relaxing its tip, and letting the air flow do the work for
> you. The difficult part is relaxing the tongue just enough. Relaxing it too
> much will result in not much of anything, while not relaxing it enough will
> produce a fricative. There's a kind of Goldilocks zone of relaxation when
> it comes to trills :P.
> 
> 
>> (I'm hoping that I'll be able to master [r] in the near future, so that
>> I can start working on the [r]/[r_j] contrast in Russian, which I had no
>> hope of before. Right now my trills require such specific configurations
>> that attempting to palatize them just doesn't work. How do those Russian
>> kids do it?!... OTOH, I'm partially comforted by the fact that Vladimir
>> Lenin himself had trouble with /r/. :-P)
>> 
>> 
> Palatalised trills are easy enough. My own problem is being unable to
> distinguish alveolo-palatal fricatives from postalveolar ones!
> -- 
> Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
> 
> http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
> http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
1g. Re: Rolling your R's
    Posted by: "Elena ``of Valhalla&#39;&#39;" elena.valha...@gmail.com 
    Date: Thu Jul 18, 2013 4:14 am ((PDT))

On 2013-07-18 at 12:30:43 +0200, BPJ wrote:
> 2013-07-18 09:56, Elena ``of Valhalla'' skrev:
> >I can't pronounce the alveolar trill, as well, and it is a sound
> >in what is supposed to be my own accent of Italian.
> So what *do* you pronounce? An uvular trill/fricative/approximant
> or an alveolar fricative/approximant?

I believe (but I'm not completely sure) that I used to pronounce 
an uvular trill (when relatively young), but now most of the time 
it is an uvular fricative.

> >I believe this case is quite common: it has a popular name (erre moscia)
> >and a page on the italian and spanish wikipedias:
> >
> >https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotacismo_(medicina)
> >https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotacismo
> 
> I would have expected 'rotacismo' to denote a replacement of /z/
> or /l/ with a rhotic -- that's what it usually means in
> historical linguistics.

me too: I searched for the popular name on the italian wikipedia 
and was redirected to that article.

> It's a bit like having [ʃ] instead of [x]/[χ] in Gothenburg. You
> are sure to get teased for it at school, at least if you're a
> boy, but people grow up. 

And if you aren't teased for the way you pronounce something, 
you are going to be teased for something else, anyway :)

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''





Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
    Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com 
    Date: Wed Jul 17, 2013 3:10 pm ((PDT))

> From: Wm Annis <wm.an...@gmail.com>


> One of the hosts, Rob, is a fan of Game of Thrones, which sent him off on 
> this path so I felt comfortable the interview would be friendly.

That certainly helps!

Am I dysremembering or did Navi not get a mention at all?

> This interview was set up a month ago, and what we talked about in
> planning then had very little to do with what we talked about on the
> show.  If I'd known the LCS was going to get multiple mentions, I might
> have spent a few moments reminding myself of everything it does.  I
> thought I flubbed that part a bit.

I'm with Christophe here -- you hit the main points pretty well.  Mind you, I
don't think an exhaustive laundry list of every single little thing the LCS does
or offers to its members would have helped anyway. People would just get
bored with such an administrative bombardment. This wasn't an LCS commercial,
after all!

Padraic

> 
> -- 
> wm
> 





Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. Re: Creoles
    Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com 
    Date: Wed Jul 17, 2013 6:24 pm ((PDT))

> From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <goldyemo...@gmail.com>

> 
> I can't begin to have a Creole for Yardish.

Possibly. (Please note that "Creole", with a capital C, is actually the name of 
a particular
creole language. It's also spelled "Kriyol", which I think is a newer, fancier 
spelling.) In
order to actually constrùct a creole, you really do need to have well developed 
languages
to start with.

But there is a way you can get around the whole issue. Since you are planning / 
working
on writing a story, you can always just make a creole be part of the linguistic 
landscape
without actually creating the language itself. Of course, as a writer, you can 
always do
that with your main conlangs as well! Some writers just create sketchlangs that 
highlight
a few of the language's high points and some lexicon. This is generally 
sufficient for
someone who wants to concentrate on writing and story without being bogged down
in grammatical minutiae.

So, you could look into what makes a creole the way it is, then consider how 
Yardish
(plus some other language) could end up producing such a descendant. Come up 
with
a few creole words and Bob's thy nuncle.

Padraic

> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mellissa Green
> 
> 
> @GreenNovelist
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:conl...@listserv.brown.edu] On 
> Behalf 
> Of R A Brown
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 9:45 AM
> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> Subject: Re: Creoles
> 
> On 17/07/2013 05:33, MorphemeAddict wrote:
>>  My understanding is that it means taking the lexicon
>>  from one language (primarily) and the grammar from
>>  another (primarily).
> 
> certainly if one of the languages is perceived as more
> prestigious than the other, vocabulary will tend to come
> from the prestigious language; but there will be odd bit
> from the other language or, indeed, languages.
> 
> Creoles often have grammatical features that are not common
> to either parent language.
> =======================================================
> 
> On 17/07/2013 13:01, Roger Mills wrote:
>>  And I think it could involve phonological borrowing too.
> 
> Most certainly.
> 
> [interesting stuff snipped]
> 
>>  Question for Ray Brown-- is that how koine Greek arose,
>>  or is said to have arisen???
> 
> Yes, same sort of way.  It developed from the Greek taken by
> Alexander's soldiers and reinforced by traders and settlers
> in the conquered territories.
> 
> It was based on the Greek of Athens, as this was seen as a
> more prestigious dialect than others; but features which
> were peculiarly Attic got ironed out with 'more acceptable'
> pan-Hellenic features from the other Ionic dialects. For
> example, the peculiarly Attic θάλασττα (thálatta) was
> replaces by Ionic θάλασσα (thalassa).
> 
> During the time of its use it was modified by the speech
> habits of L2 speakers; this was probably why pitch accent
> gave way during the roman period to stress accent.
> 
> But it was a Koine, not a Creole.  It is not improbable that
> in seaports, for example, Greek-based pidgins become
> creolized, but we have no record of any such creoles.
> 
> -- 
> Ray
> ==================================
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com
> ==================================
> "language … began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
> for individual beings and events."
> [Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
> 





Messages in this topic (13)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
4a. How Mentolatian Whisks Away All its Consonants
    Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com 
    Date: Wed Jul 17, 2013 8:11 pm ((PDT))



Voiceless dentals go yer ways,
    see yez in some oblique case!

Ablaut and Umlaut came to play,
     a > ə, e > ae, u > o > naught!
Mentolatian likes to take the nom. pl. of a noun and use that as a root
for a semantically extended series of nouns. For example, we have the
word dazg (house, roof, covering) whose plural is jí (from old dəzgí).
This plural becomes a new root, j- and can form a new word with a
common nominal stem, -un. Hence, jun, cloth. The plural of cloth, jní,
plus a different nominal stem, -aru, gives us sinaru, clothing. The plural
of clothing, snáer, yields a common word for a suit or wardrobe of
clothing, sneres. Finally, the plural of suits, zrəzí, plus a curious little
combining root, -sd (place where), gives us erzed, an armoir or dresser.

So, where the heck did dazg- go off to???

Padraic





Messages in this topic (8)





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