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Salaam! Eskribishe (=you wrote): <<<Ah, one non-Turkic thing about my language is that it has noun classes, a la Bantu. Currently, there are seventeen (e.g., Class I: sensient, untitled human beings; Class II: Hairy land animals; Class III: Flying, non-insect animals, etc.). One of the noun classes, Class XIV, is the action class. So, if you have the root /us/, which has something to do with eating, then /usnu/ is "eating", the class suffix being -nQ, where Q is underspecified vowel: /u/ after high vowels, /o/ after non-high vowels.>>> That's nice. Did you try to checkif any natlangs have class suffixes? I recollect Bantu and North Caucasian ones. They have prefixes, but I need to investigate more. <<<Along with this, I have a nominalizer/infinitive suffix -(A)(l/n) (A is underspecified just like the Turkish, so it's /A/ after back vowels, /e/ after front vowels, and with the /l/ ~ /n/ variation, Zhyler doesn't allow /lVl/, so when that occurs, the second /l/ becomes [n]. The same things happens with /rVr/, the second /r/ becoming [z]). However, I've noticed, after writing in the language for awhile, that I never actually use the infinitive. The verb is always conjugated, and for actions, I use the Class XIV suffix. So what my idea was was to delete the Class XIV suffix, and replace it with the infinitive, thereby making the infinitive a noun class in itself.>>> I recollect the bit of Swahili I used to learn, and it seems like infinitives there are just nouns - names of action, with nominal class prefix ku-. So, IMHO, it's better to eliminate infinitive than a class indicator... I would be more consistent... <<<I don't know what the ramifications of this would be (haven't tested it yet), so I haven't made it permanent, but that was my idea. I was unsure what it would mean to do this, though, and I was wondering if y'all had any insight.>>> That's why we are here! <<<It's called Njaama, it's a tone language, somewhat isolational, though infixing, and it works via this adjunct structure, is what I'm calling it (the way a friend of mine here in the Berkeley linguistics department analyzed Leggbo negation).>>> Intriguing! But I see we'll need Africanists here! <<<It also has drawn some influence from Middle Egyptian, which I've been studying this semester.>>> Yum yum yum. One day I'll definitely reach the point when I seeze that nice ancient _mdw ntr_ and do some experiments with it! At least it fits the program of the list! <<<So, that's it for me so far. :) Looking forward to hearing about other people's ideas, because they always give me more ideas, and more ideas is what I like.>>> You're always welcome. But could you please avoid using HTML? Some ppl here cannot read it. (I can, but I prefer palin text too.) -David Be-kheiro, Yitzik ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ P.S. btw, words of welcome were written not in Arabic, but in Rumiya -- an Arabo-Romance conlang of mine. It's very, very raw yet, still on the experimental stage, hasn't reached any reasonable stability. So, a correction: the second phrase should be read: "Somos fèlitzos berLo a-Ostad aquí". |Ostad| is NOT "Usted", that's from Ar. |;usta;D| "master".