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I do know, pretty much wich ever way I go I end up with things being marked for 2 genders (m/f) and 3 cases (Genitive, a combined Dative-Ablative and "Whatever-you'd-call-everyting-else-together") - so that seems cut and dry. But when I get down to the finer details I have plurals in one declension resembling singulars in another, some datives that look like nomintives, nominatives that look like genitives... ugh.
Problem is a lot of vowels are disappearing due to a-umlaut early on, then i- and j-umlaut later, and the Hochdeutsch phonology is eventually levelling final vowels to <e>, which is messing up the Latin endings (good), but not in any readily useable way (not so good) . My ideal would be to be able to use umlaut morphologically, as with German - but the triggers for umlaut exist in all all forms in some declensions, only some forms in others, and not at all in others.
Henrik, you must have had similar problems - although I guess Icelandic kept the differentiation among its final vowels, which must help a lot.
It's a conundrum.I could "cheat" and make some drastic changes to the phonological development, but wheres the fun in that? Also moves it all away from the OHG, which I want to keep as much as possible.
Pete.----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Christopherson" <rakko@hidden.email>
To: <romconlang@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 11:30 PM Subject: Re: [romconlang] Lethino Pronouns
On Mar 11, 2007, at 5:57 PM, jsjonesmiami wrote:Hi! I'm working on a new language, currently called Lethino, which branches off fairly early. One problem I have is that, because s > x, which > 0 when word final, the 3rd person plural object pronouns become identical to the corresponding singular pronouns. Any ideas?I have a few ideas: You could let them merge, and have only context disambiguate them. Or you could borrow from other cases, such as the nominative (although I don't know which cases you are using). Or you could use a content word like "men" or "persons" (or even <gens> "people") and have it evolve into a 3rd-person plural pronoun.