11 June, 2009
5 May, 2009
Mærik: Deriving nouns from verbs and the word amn
Mærik also uses active/passive participles as agent/patient nouns but it uses zero derivation, i.e. just uses the participle as a noun without further ado. From the POW of Mærik itself there is no ‘double meaning’; that lekartan can or must sometimes be translated as ‘the one who is speaking’ and sometimes as ‘the speaker’ is a complication of English grammar which is simply absent in Mærik grammar. (more…)
Kijeb verb inflection
In the shower one day I had a flash of inspiration and finally knew how Kijeb tense-aspect-mood marking should be organized. I’ll try to manage to describe it without access to my dictionary.
Many aspects (sic!) of the following wholly or partly obsoletize things said on the Kijeb page on FrathWiki.
8 April, 2009
The Rhodrese indefinite article
On Conlang Herrig Thaillí (Henrik Theilling) wrote in response to me:
I’m ATM in woes WRT the Rhodrese indefinite article. I feel that the changes I’ve made to the feminine indefinite and plural definite forms call for a change in the plural indefinite as well. Consider the following patterns:
masc. sing. fem. sing. plur. _#C _#V _#C _#V _#C _#V def. el el la l’ li gl’ indef. un un na n’ eun eun OR
masc. sing. fem. sing. plur. _#C _#V _#C _#V _#C _#V def. el el la l’ li gl’ indef. un un na n’ ni gn’ Is the latter preferable or am I over-regularizing?
NB eun would still mean ‘some, a few’, while aocú means ‘some, any’ and naocú means ‘not any, none’.
My gut feeling for Rhodese is that the first alternative is more like it. It has that nice vowel change. And the system should not be made too regular I think.
27 March, 2009
Rhodrese articles and indefinite pronouns
Some while ago I had to change my mind on the shape of the plural definite article in Rhodrese. Ever since the inception of the lang I’d thought the plural definite article was il, but with the rule that unstressed e and unstressed i are pronounced alike as [ɪ] a plural il would be homophonous with the masculine el, and I can clearly not have that! Better then to have the plural article as li, with the prepositions + article contractions becoming dilli, alli, polli etc. Needless to say the plural article before words beginning in a vowel remains gl’.
This also offers a clue to the demise of distinct feminine forms, for surely the feminine plural article was originally le but became homophonous with the masculine li. The abolition of le was surely one of Bernual’s reforms.