Agree. Given that the Ngauro situation is yet unresolved and that Legion wants it, my suggestion for a good task for Sano (if he wants it) would be to create the Tjakori syllabary borrowed by Adāta. This would give a good base for the later development of a full Dāiadak script family. It would also give him plenty of creative freedom, instead of having to cope with the whole Edastean/Ngauro mess. The one issue there is that little is known of the Tjakori language, so perhaps he should just create the Adāta version directly... but that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. Let's see what he wants to do.cedh audmanh wrote:I'm not sure if you had seen it, but two weeks ago Sano announced his intention of creating a script for Akana. I think we should get him involved in the script discussion...A well-known scriptmaster wrote:I plan to create a few proto-scripts for some of the (base) langs here.
AHA! And the Eige-Isthmus Enigma gets more interesting still. That relationship (of zafwita to kwintas) was completely unintended, but I like the mysterious possibilities it offers. Are you thinking the word should have been borrowed into Miwan from Meshi? There is probably not room in for s-cluster lenition in the main Miwan languages (where sibilant-plosive clusters abound) but it could have happened in Meshi. Pending #12's approval, now, since he's staked a claim. Another possibility is that the prefix morpheme was actaully zaf- (or its equivalent) and that the [k] was simply deleted from such clusters. But this solution leaves out the sexy connection to NT gw > bw.cedh audmanh wrote:BTW I've found a rather fascinating word during this research. It means "bird's nest", attested in Forest Miwan as zafwi:ta and in Eastern Miwan as zafwita:. It is clearly related to FMiw kwintas "bird" (from PEI *gwent "to fly", cf. Faraghin ghantač "dragon"), and it shows some unusual sound changes not present in the uncompounded form. Most saliently, there is a lenition of PEV *kw to *fw after a morpheme that might just be related to the PI genitive prefix *as-. In Western Isthmus, any plosive following this prefix lenited in a similar manner. AND: the POA change involved here is parallel to the unusual NT change *gw > *bw! Maybe this word is our first glimpse of Meshi...
That connection might be hard to establish, though - the timing and locations are difficult. That sound change happened somewhere right around -2000 YP, long after the Meshi and Miw were last in regular contact. It would have to have been recently enough before standard Ndak Ta that it may not have spread to the Western dialects (as neither Adāta nor Ndok Aisô show a labial reflex) and the late occurrance is supported by both internal reconstruction and comparison with Tlaliolz as well. And with location, as implied by the above, the bw change probably originated in the eastern end of the empire while the Meshi were out in the far west.
However, the eastern Ndak would have been in some contact with more local Miw. Perhaps rather than Meshi, it should be some other Miwan language involved... or perhaps not, because another idea occurs to me. What if the POA change in zafwita is actually due to the word's having experienced the bw change in NT itself? That would make it a boomerang borrowing: Miw -> NT -> Miw. Such things are far from unattested on Earth, of course. But I don't know how it would work even then. This solution would appear to require first a voicing of the [k] in kwintas in one language or the other, followed by fronting in NT, followed by devoicing and leniting bw to fw later in a Miwan language. That's a lot of railroading we'd have to do. So I'm not sure this works any better than the Meshi solution.
Well. I'm just reading it now, and I don't really have any huge things to say beyond keep up the good work. But there are various minor things...Corumayas wrote:I've uploaded some more detailed thoughts about Eige-Isthmus morphosyntax. I'm still in extrapolating-from-Faraghin mode, but working toward identifying where there's room to invent things and what those things might look like. I'd appreciate comments, if anyone can muster the patience to read through it...
- Why is the word for guitar "clearly" head-final? I had conceived zukatun and pa:ntun both to quite directly mean "red fruit" and "red music" (the latter intended as a metaphorical term not unakin to Blues music, at the risk of sounding like a cheap knockoff).
- Later added by cedh: "My guess is that this would have happened before -2000 YP because the strong superstratum influence of Ndak Ta (which is head-initial) would certainly not have encouraged this change." (emphasis mine) -- Just a minor factual correction: Ndak Ta is definitely a strongly VO language, but Dewrad made an error in the Adāta grammar when he said NT's compounds are all head-initial. I explicitedly stated in the original NT grammar that both head-initial and head-final compounds were common. That was intended as one of several traces of a former OV order in the Talo-Edastean history; SOV word order remains in some NT subclauses, for example. But this doesn't really affect the correct statement that Edastean influence is unlikely to cause another language to switch to head-final order.
- The notes for aspect in Faraghin puzzle me: surely -čan isn't more common than -an in the lexicon. So how can it be more productive than the old voice system, which apparently affects every single Faraghin verb via the stem vowel? I'm not sure why the suffix couldn't continue to be analyzable in Faraghin as -č-a-n: lexicalized repetetive aspect, then lexicalized active voice, then inflectional 3SG.
