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? con quesa posts: 13
, Layperson, California
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Pronouns and object affixes:

I want to run with this object-agreement marking thing, so why not create a set of pronouns so that some but not all of the object-agreement markers can phonetically resemble them?


1sg pat
2sg ŋun
3sg t'o
3sg - Fem t'one

1pl iba
2pl ic'i
3pl ino
3pl-FEM (i)nobe

In this system, one 3rd person pronoun is specifically marked as feminine and used for feminine animate antecedents, and the other pronoun is unmarked and used for all non-animate-feminine antecedents. Basically as if English "it" and "he" were a single pronoun. These are only the nominative stems, and I'll leave it to someone else to decide how different case forms of the pronouns should be formed - maybe there's an oblique stem? A genitive stem for only that case?


I've already coined -d as a 3rd person singular object marker, so let's fill out the rest of the series:

1s -(a)p
2s -(i)ŋ
3s -(i)d
3sF -e
1pl -(a)pi
2pl -(i)ŋi
3pl -(i)n
3plF -(i)ne

Let's coin a couple of verb stems, mæk'o "visit, call upon", and job "work for, be paid by", and a couple of nouns - ebsa "person", yukna, "priestess", roba, "fortune teller", to use as examples:

Wæka (pat) mæk'op
Wæka 1sg visit-1sOBJ
"Wæka visits me"

Wæka (pat) jobap
Wæka 1sg work.for-1sOBJ
"Wæka works for me"

Wæka (ebsu) jobin
Wæka person-NOM.PL work.for-3pOBJ
Wæka works for them

Yukna roba mæk'od
priestess fortune.teller visit-3sOBJ
"A priestess visits a fortune-teller"

Roba yukna mæk'oe
fortune.teller priestess visit-3sOBJF
"A fortune-teller visits a priestess"

Yukna mæk'oŋi
priestess visit-2pOBJ
"A priestess visits you all"

Roba (ic'i) jobiŋi
fortune.teller you.all work.for-2pOBJ
"A fortune teller is in the employ of you all"
in thread: Isharian-1
? con quesa posts: 13
, Layperson, California
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Morphology suggestions:

In bringing up the gaas thing, I've already implicitly suggested that there be some kinds of light verbs that modify a non-finite semantically meaningful verb (in this case, some light verb meaning "do" whose phonetic shape is something like as). I've also implicitly introduced the affix -d as a 3rd person object agreement marker on the verb, and I've added it to the non-finite verb rather than the finite one. (Maybe this system grew out of something akin to that of Spanish, where object pronouns can attach to infinitives, cf. yo quiero mirar-lo)

Do people like this idea? What sorts of pronoun distinctions should Isharian-1 make? Gender? Politeness? Formality?
in thread: Isharian-1
? con quesa posts: 13
, Layperson, California
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quoting Rhetorica, Kelatetía: Dis, Major Belt 1:
Woah, hold up. Kabyle has two approximants and two trills, not just a weeby tap. It's very out-of-place to have such an undiverse PoA given how many series of plosives and fricatives there are.

And now a rant about transliteration schemes.

As far as I can tell from their Wikipedia recordings, [ʕ] is barely audible, and contrast between [ħ] and [h] is ridiculously hard to hear. If you want those sounds, make them allophones, not distinct phonemes. Even if they get distinct graphemes, there should be some contextual rule about which is used, e.g. [ħ] in word-initial positions but [h] elsewhere. [ʕ] probably doesn't even deserve a grapheme, but could maybe work as the sound of lenition-in-progress as applied to a [ʁ] or [ɣ] consonant (as a counterpart to [x], since otherwise it seems there's plenty of voiced/unvoiced/aspirated-unvoiced contrast in the inventory.)

I think if this collablang is going to be safe from the level of autistic xenophilia that presumably brought about the aforementioned ten-tone lang, then attention really does need to be spent on naturalism. The original writing system of the Berber family, Tifinagh, is quite inexact about phonology—it was originally an Abjad with numerous variants and redundancies. Even today all three common orthographies (Latin, Neo-Tifinagh, and Arabic) have some amount of ambiguity in what a given letter represents. I can understand that, while constructing the language, it might be desirable to have an exact system of phonics1 but no everyday orthography has a perfect 1:1 correlation for more than a few minutes after its creation.


Yeah like I said I missed the line about a phonology like Kabyle being a desideratum before I came up with what I came up with. To be honest, I'm not super into Berber languages myself, don't know a whole lot about them, and don't have any particular desire to create a language that's particularly similar to Berber languages. I think collapsing the [ħ]/[h] distinction into a single phoneme is a good idea, and if people want to make other changes to the phonological inventory, they should suggest them. I also think that talking about how the writing system (if one exists) ought to work is a bit premature, that should wait until the phonology is completely ironed out and we've made a lot more of the language.


Also I reject your claim that a language having /ɾ/ as it's only liquid is "weeby". Lots of languages lack /l/.

_________________________
1. "Hukt on fonix wurkt fer mi", as the kids used to say.
in thread: Isharian-1

con quesa
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