Quiet Words

I've done the first version of the script, visible here -- at least temporarily.


The labels on the left are the consonants for the leftmost column of entries. Those on the right are for the rest, except where individually noted. The consonants are the base values, prior to further phonetic and orthographic changes.

Edit: I've added a sample text:

I'm putting this here before I forget.

I've been thinking today about making a syllabary for Nasqi, along the following lines:

16 basic symbols + 3 diacritics + punctuation (word separator, sentence terminator, perhaps notations for extra emphasis (on a particular word), whispering, shouting etc.)
The basic symbols would encode consonant + high/low vowel, the diacritics would be added for front vowel, back vowel, or special.
( table behind cut )
2005.Jan.16: I fixed the HTML -- LJ was adding closing tags, but in the wrong place. A trillion curses on the creators of XHTML for their cavalier attitude towards backwards compatibility.

Notes on conlang meeting (2004.Dec.30 1800 - 2300)
I'm writing this down while it's still fresh. I may edit it later.

---

I finally met another conlanger in person: Roger Mills of CONLANG list fame, who's visiting family in Boca. We met at his favorite restaurant: Bob's Pizza in Deerfield Beach (excellent but expensive; thankfully, he was paying for mine).

It only took me about 2 hours 30 minutes to get there from Miami. This was due to taking a detour, rush hour traffic on I95, rainy weather in North Dade to Central Broward, and me taking the wrong exit onto Hillsborough Blvd (not well marked!). I figured out something was wrong before I got to Loxahatchie and turned around. I stopped and called via cell phone which someone generously let me use. I had the manager ask for Roger. They didn't find him. I proceeded to the restaurant anyways, found a parking place with no trouble. While I was asking the head waiter ... there was Roger at the front table (the verbal descriptions we gave each other were accurate).

Mostly things other than conlanging were discussed while I ate (he was just finishing desert when I arrived about 1915, only 1 hour 15 minutes late). I gave him the shocking news about John Cowan resigning from the Instrumentality.

After dinner we took a walk discussing how things in the area had changed over the decades -- I had had a bit of sambuca and 2 glasses of wine, and Roger had had more wine I think.
Then we drove up to where he was staying in Boca (less than a mile I think). Roger pored over my scribbled notes for Nasqi and L200408 which I had brought with me. We discussed those and the challenges he was having with Gwr. It's great to be able to show another conlanger the raw material rather than having to write up a coherent explanation for LJ or mailing list.

I also got to see the picture of the shaved cat. OK -- it's fur had grown back by the time this picture was taken.

Roger finally threw me out around 2300. He had served some additional coffee and if I wasn't completely sober, my judgment couldn't have been worse than it was driving up.
It took an hour to get home.

I've been working more on Nasqi, typing up my notes, and HTMLizing them. The last is showing me how much more I need to do. My biggest problem is trying to explain, in English, how things work. Since I'm not working from an established model, all terms have to be defined. Also I have to come up with the terms in the first place. One particular problem involves "noun" and "verb"; I find that I use these 2 different ways:
lexically, where a verb can have a number of aspects and a noun can't, and
syntactically, where nouns "clarify" the verb's arguments.
I think the latter usage is more correct, in which case I need to come up with new terms for the former.

My strategy for developing Nasqi is to start by creating a protolanguage and applying successive changes.

At the earliest stage, the phonology is very simple: 8 consonants and 5 vowels with only CV syllables.
C represents consonants: *p, *t, *k, *s, *b, *d, *g, *l.
V represents vowels: *i, *e, *a, *o, *u (the usual suspects).

The stress will be on the first syllable. Secondary stress will develop on odd syllables, leaving even syllables unstressed. This leads to one of the first sound changes: unstressed high vowels drop out, leaving the consonant to become the coda of the previous syllable. That is,
*CVci ==> CVC and
*CVcu ==> CVC .

Note: Upper case letters will be used for stressed or stressable syllables and lower case letters for unstressed or unstressable ones. This doesn't apply to phonetic symbols of course.

There will then a number of changes to the consonants, based on what each one occurs next to. The actual changes and their sequence hasn't been finalized, but I have a preliminary table ( here )

In a later change, (unstressed) *e and *o will be raised to [i] and [u], respectively.

One consonant change not shown in the table is that the [h] resulting from *s between vowels will disappear when unstressed. This causes the 2 vowels to form a diphthong or a long vowel. Again, I have a preliminary table ( here )

The resulting syllable types are:
CV -- short stressable
cv -- short unstressable
CVC -- long stressable (with coda consonant)
CVV -- long stressable (with long nucleus)

The list of phones occurring is ( here )

Note: I've used phonetic notation, but possibly phonemic notation would be better, since the phonetic values are only approximate here, and there will probably be variation not yet shown. On the other hand I haven't attempted a real phonemic analysis.

*** corrected a couple of typos 2004-06-14 08:08 ***