[YG Conlang Archives] > [romconlang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
I'm making this thread to post thoughts about Silvish and ideas I have for it. I might also put up longer translations if the mood strikes.
Ask any questions you have and share any comments. :)
I'll start by pasting in the things I wrote about Silvish in Lex's intro thread. After that, I'll talk a bit about orthography.
Silvish is a Gallo-Romance-ish language spoken in the French Alps. It has maintained three grammatical cases, though no single noun distinguishes more than two. It also has innovated two genders — called "common" and "noble" — which overlap the inherited masculine and feminine; they are loosely based on animacy, so that all noble-gender nouns refer to humans but not all human nouns are noble-gender.
Let's see. Here are some other things:…
- Silvish is strongly reminiscent of French, sound-wise, but stress is more salient.
- I haven't talked about it on my CBB thread, but morae play an important role in allophony and other phonological processes.
- The orthography is quite regular but also assumes a certain amount of native-speaker intuition.
Sort of, but the catalyst for [the common and noble genders'] development was different. It has to do with the cases. Originally, nouns distinguished all three modern cases (nominative, accusative, oblique), but then most nouns lost the nominative and replaced it with the accusative forms; they would ultimately become the common gender. A group of human nouns lost the accusative instead and filled its role with the oblique; they would become noble gender. Through analogy, adjectives and articles began to distinguish the same cases as the nouns they modified, and thus the new declension classes became genders.The core noble-gender nouns are based on the Modern French nouns that come from the Latin nominative rather than the accusative (prêtre, peintre, nonne, sire/monsieur, etc.). I haven't completely settled on how many other nouns get in yet, but a lot of words for the nobility do, hence the name.Alright. One thing I forgot to address in the second post was the native speaker intuition assumed by Silvish orthography. The intuition in this case mainly relates to a phonological concept in Silvish. Stress in the language operates above the word level. Utterances are divided up into smaller units, of at least one word each, called "chains."There are several phonological processes connected to chains, but relevant for this topic is the fact that each chain contains only one stressed syllable, either the penult or the ult of the final word. At the end of a chain, there are a few vowels that can represent either a stressed vowel or an unstressed vowel. When they represent a stressed vowel, they are marked with a grave or acute accent to prevent ambiguity. But otherwise, stress is unmarked.As a result, in order to read written Silvish, one has to parse out many of the chain endings based on the grammar of the sentence. For example, if you see lê, it could be either a definite article or the adverb "there." With the former meaning, it is always unstressed; with the latter, it is always stressed. Only the context of the sentence can make clear which pronunciation/meaning is intended.