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On 28 May 2008, at 04:49 , Isaac Penzev wrote:
On Tuesday, May 27, 2008 11:39 PM, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:I've essentially added rather arbitrary vowelsWhy not trying some Arabic vocalisation? At least, CaCi:C pattern for adjectives seems so appealing...
Well, I'm all for it. I had been thinking I might fill in some of my conlang's "missing DNA" with ideas from Arabic. The problem is I don't know much about it!
Is the CaCi:C adjective pattern pretty regular for triconsonantal roots? Using dSr as an example, I guess that would then give me "dashiru", /da.'Si:.4u/. (For lack of any better plan, I've been either putting stress where there are long vowels, or putting long vowels where I imagine stress.)
Actually I now find myself uncertain about how to form feminine nouns. I have been slapping a feminine marker -t on the root and then tacking case ending markers after that: f.nom.sg. dashratu, f.nom.pl. dashratuwa .... but it seems to me that Real Egyptian actually formed feminine plurals by first adding the -w- marker for the plural and _then_ the -t feminine marker, which would give me a f.nom.pl. like .. dashrawatu, instead. Not sure how to go here. Maybe I need to check some comparative ideas from Arabic or (if I can find any examples) other Afro-asiatic languages.
So far I have a very simple declensional structure for nouns and adjectives, with masculine and feminine genders, singular and plural numbers, and 3 cases: nominative, oblique, and genitive.Why not retain dual?
Well, mostly because I've never really gotten along with the dual case. :) It always seemed to make things unnecessarily complicated, IMO. ;) Still, I've got such a blindingly simple morphology at the moment that it can't much trouble to have a dual ....
If I remember aright, Egyptian formed some sort of dual by tacking a / j/ glide onto the end of the plural (at least for masculine nouns), perhaps with a vowel of some kind preceding it. My standard masculine nominative plural ending is -uwa (the nom.sg. -u + -w- with an epenthetic -a to ease pronunciation); I could just slap /j/ on the end to make the m.nom dual ending -uwaj. As for the feminine dual, I gather there's uncertainly about whether Egyptian formed the feminine dual by adding a -j to the singular or (like the masculine) the plural ... but I guess I need to decide whether my feminine plurals end in -t or in a case-marking vowel before I can sort that out in my conlang....
Not sure what happens in Arabic for the dual, nor in other Afro- asiatic languages. My case endings are, I think, more Afro-asiatic than Egyptian (nom. -u, obl. -a, gen. -i), so maybe I need to look for some more examples of dual morphology out there ....
Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/