[YG Conlang Archives] > [romconlang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
Hi!
Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
> theiling@hidden.email skrev:
> > Hi!
> >
> > Peter wrote:
>
> >>Finally, yes, of course I read it! I told you it was
> >>lovely. Those I-umlauts are a bitch though, huh?
> >>Certainly causing me a headache here, further south.
> >
> >
> > I-umlauts, u-umlauts, a-umlauts. Of course, the i-umlaut is short for
> > i-umlaut, j-umlaut, R-umlaut and combinatorial palatal umlaut and
> > u-umlaut is short for u-umlaut and w-umlaut. And they happen early
> > and/or late and/or in between, etc.
> >
> > Headache? Yes.
>
> Why? I just love it.
But I love them, too. :-) Did I imply anything else? Would I have
chosen Icelandic if not its beauty had impressed me?? :-))
> Complicated, yes, but the processes themselves are phonetically
> quite simple: ...
Of course, but the constraints *when* they happen are awfully complex.
> ... I'll however readily admit that (1) I have a
> long-standing (30 years out of 39!) love affair with
> Icelandic/Old Norse ...
Well, I noticed it's beauty when I was ~16 and eversince bought books
and audio media about it to enjoy.
>... (**)In my a-priori conlang family Sohlob a/i/u-umlaut serve to
>transform a 3-vowel system into a 9-vowel system -- albeit it later
>shrinks into a 6- or 5-vowel system, but introduces vowel harmony --
>if you want it may be said to again become a (different) 3-vowel
>system plus a VH phoneme! ...
I love this, too. My conlang without words, S11, has three different
vowel harmonies (but not umlauts), that create ten phonetic vowels
from two phonemic ones.
> As it happens I'm also working on a Romlang with umlaut, the most
> important feature of which is that number of nouns and adjectives
> will be expressed by changes in the stem-vowel. It will be nothing
> like a Germanic language otherwise, the idea is rather to come up
> with a lang superficially similar to (Old) French, but which arrived
> at that phonology by a rather different route (at least as far as
> the vowels are concerned).
Keep us informed, I like this type of stuff a lot. Þrjótrun is the
first of my own conlangs, though, were I am quite satisfied with the
mutation system so far (before that, only my very artificial engelang
systems pleased me, and in Qþyn|gài, I even think of removing it
again) and I've always enjoyed looking into other people's systems,
especially constructed, but naturalistic ones.
> Henrik:
> > Moreover, 'þrjótur' is
> > even an Icelandic word (meaning 'villain' :-)).
>
> Frekar gaman! I didn't think of that!
Hehe. :-) I also noticed that 'lyng' ('language' in Þrj.) is a plant
in Icelandic whose name I fail to know in English right now
(de. 'Heidekraut'). I suppose many others will follow...
BTW, I also have non-coincidental pairs that mean the same in
Icelandic and Þrjótrun, either because Germanic borrowed from Romance
or because Romance borrowed from Germanic, e.g. björk (< PG
*berko:(n) 'birch') and fjörður (< PG *ferþuz 'fjord') for Germanic
ones, and engill (< Lat. angellus 'angel') for Romance ones. Of
course, declension is different, probably driving Icelanders nuts. :-)
**Henrik