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Oh! I've been working on revising Ghaf for a while now. Nothing really fundamental has changed, but there's more irregularities in the morphology, the TAM system works somewhat differently, and there's more syntax (hopefully eventually a lot more). Also I think there are some errors on the original page. If you want to work on Ghaf, I'll try to get as much of the new material as I have finished online as quickly as I can.

Related: there are some differences between the version of Yïåf jmcd just posted and the one I based Ghaf on-- it looks like he revised the sound changes and changed a bunch of words accordingly. I'm trying to decide whether to adopt these revisions into Ghaf or not; it would change a bunch of words that I'm used to. I may leave it as is, or give both versions, and chalk it up to dialectal variation in either case... hmm.


@Shigeru-- if you have any specific questions, go ahead and ask them; no doubt somebody here will be able to answer. If you don't know where to start, do some reading about language change in the real world. is a great place to look for sound change ideas.

So, my most recent revision project for Ghaf has been the lexicon. I've tried to incorporate the changes in Yïåf per jmcd's latest post, and check the sound changes in general, and I think I'd also like to expand it. Which leads me to two large questions.


1. There are a lot more words in Adāta than made it into A'gaf/Yïåf/Ghaf. I've already put a handful of these through all the sound changes from Adāta to Ghaf (as well as I could figure them out anyway), and those've been in the lexicon all along. I could do the same with more, but I wonder if the people whose languages are ancestral to Ghaf would like to participate and/or influence the process. It'd certainly be more interesting that way.

So, Zhen Lin, Legion, and jmcd, would you care to expand our branch's collective lexicon this way? Of course we could each apply semantic shifts, have some words drop out of use, derive new ones, etc. It might make the most sense to wait and do it whenever the list of extra words that Radius was talking about a while ago materializes, and just add some words from the original Adāta lexicon to the list that we pass along. Does that sound worthwhile?


2. Also, I think it would be fun to have more borrowing among the branches. The problem is that it's hard to tell which languages should be contemporaneous with each other. For example, I suspect that the languages I originally borrowed from, Yhát and Zhaj, should actually be significantly earlier than Ghaf. Would it be possible to work out a rough chronology? There's already some dates and time spans mentioned here and there, but they're scattered and sometimes inconsistent; it'd be nice to be able to say for sure that Öhat, Old Erhadzy, Aríe, and Yïåf are all spoken at about the same period, or whatever. Maybe a little conworlding could go along with this too; we could assign geographical locations to the langs that don't have that now, and piece together an outline history if we want. Anybody up for that?

The problem is that I am actually very reluctent to work on Agaf again, because :

-Frankly it's ugly - that's one of the reason I made Kozado, because I consider Agaf to be a big failure and I wanted to fix that somehow.
-The intricate sandhi rules of Ayath, combined with the absence of lexicon and the obscurity of some sound change (I've never understood what à è ì ò ù where supposed to stand for) make any derivation of a new word a nightmare.
-I don't like Ayasth, having a language like Adata, with no more (if less) inflections than English, suddenly turning into an über-agglutinative polysynthetic language is just not plausible.


By the way, I've been working on Kozado, a large lexicon will soon be online... as well as something else (let's say it will be a surprise).

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http://thelegion.free.fr/kozado.htm

The lexicon of Kozado is now online - it's not finished and still to be expanded, but there's already more than 110 words.

Okay, so Dewrad's been a lazy sod and hasn't done anything with the new Ndak Ta words. So I asked permission to apply semantic changes and other lexicon management to them. Which is now done. Unfortunately the Relay Curse struck yet again when my computer went completely belly-up, and so the sound changes I'd already applied to the list are now inaccessible and have to be redone. Then the lot has to be HTMLified, or otherwise put into a publishable format.

But, I'm on it. At this point I'm so annoyed that the long-promised new words STILL haven't been produced that I'm going to press on until they are, despite the annoyance of doing the entire task myself. I'll check in again in the next day or so with either a finished list or else a progress report.

Okay, sound changes are done. And once again I have to extend my gratitude to Corumayas for making doing a proper job of it possible - thank you!

I did notice a necessary change you missed, however: N > n / _#. After all the changes were applied, some word-final [N] remained and had to be converted - perhaps that situation simply didn't arise with the original wordset, I don't know. Also about 3/4 of the vowels in the new list are long, which annoys me, but whichever.