zompist bboard

Hope you don't mind, Jburke, but since I will be trying my hand at a polysynthetic language, I will probably be asking some questions (although most of them were answered in the first part of this thread). You don't have to make the morphology like that of Mohawk. T?l@uilğo/ does it like this: ...

You could devise some "abbreviations" for verbal nouns that are incorporable. Cheyenne has medial forms; Noyatukah has initial forms. In modern Mohawk, only noun roots are incorporable; but of old, it's been thought that it worked somewhat like Cheyenne: you could incorporate any nominal because it...

Can you incorporated the object "star destroyer"?

No, the word for star destroyer means it-destroys-stars.

Tl!aalama k?st?u?f?l?ni.-I saw a stardestroyer.

Xelik@es?ek?mi.-He wants to eat meat.

I think tht looks good. You can also say this: Xeqstemu?xilik@es?ek?mi.-He wants to eat meat instead of an apple.(Or ...but not an apple.)

I'm changing it to be on the safe side.

Is it a bad thing that the preverb is in between the noun and verb?

How do you say 'he-wants-to-eat-meat'?

Lik@axes?ek?mi.
Lik@a-xe-s?e-k?-mi
meat-want-eat-4SOA-3SSA.
He wants to eat meat.

Note that 4SOA means 4th person singular animate object.

BTW, do your preverbs work like Algonquian preverbs?

If they proceed the verb directly, they do:

Xes?emi.
Xe-s?e-mi.
Want-eat-3rd.person.singular.animate.subject
He wants to eat.

T?l@uilğo/ has 5 aspects(default, imperfect, habitual, starting, and stopping). I'm guessing that isn't too many.

Well I certainly don't have 27 aspects.

Given that English has thousands of words relating to sex, I think have two words for necessity(x?-, need to; -', must) isn't unreasonable.

Alright, yeah. Your 'weak command' sounds like Precative Mood, signaling a request. I may be wrong, though

I suppose, although it doesn't mean please exactly.

K'?la'ik?lamek-Build the building. (strong) K'?la'ik?lamet-Please build the building. (weak) K'?la'ik?lame'-You have to build the building. (necessitive) I've gotten rid of readyness and made it a preverb, like want. The necessive isn't all that necessary as there is a preverb that does something si...

T?l@uilğo/ only has 34 phonemes and 3 aspects, although it does have a lot of things, about 6(strong command, weak command, question, requirement, what should be, readyness), that I think are moods. I'm not sure.

Is my conlang too complex? It has 48 suffixes for noun verb agreement, 35 or so suffixes that indicate location, time, etc. that act like cases, but can be used on verbs. I think it's a little too complex and I wanted your opinion.

Maybe not. In all the Algonquian daughter languages that retain any trace of the preaspirates, non-preaspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ are reflexes of the clusters *sp, *st and *sk or *shk (and, in the case of Cheyenne, of *l, which turned into /t/). I thought having at least 2 of the sounds p, t, and k was...

The preaspirated stops /hp/, /ht/, /hk/; it's possible there was also a series
of non-preaspirated stops that contrasted with these

So there may not have been ordinary p, t, and k?

Also, the adjectives prefix to the nouns they effect as in t/ok'?la(big building, t/o-k'?la). Is this a good idea?

That must have been hard to learn.

Cheyenne vowels have inherent distinctive pitch, high or low. The pitch can (and often does) shift when you add affixes to a word. E.g., matek?me 'raccon' vs. m?tekomeo?o 'raccoons'. This is a simple example; most Cheyenne words have muliple accents.

Why does the pitch shift? What are the rules?

Well, take the origin of the name Adirondack , as in Adirondack Mountains; it comes from the Mohawk hatir?:ntaks 'they-eat-trees'. The word in Mohawk names a kind of biting fly of the Northeast (not sure of the species). And the Cheyenne word for 'rabbit', vohkooheho, means 'his-posture-bends'. Alg...

I see. Can you give me more examples of this kinestetic mindset in language?

If a language had 2 numbers, 3 genders, and 3 numbers, then it'd have 18 posible comboniations for the subject and object. That would total to 324 affixes if the gender, number, and person were expressed in one affix. Didn't you day Mohawk does that?

Interesting. While it fits the phonology better than missionary orthography, it shows the same lag between sound change and writing that other systems show, like how English still writes things a certain way.

When did they develop their script, Jburke?