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See comments inline. On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Eamon Bohan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi everyone, I'm new to this place but I've been reading some of the posts > for a while. > I guess it's somewhat obvious, yes I'm interested in what concerns > languages in general, conlanging and historical linguistics. > > The reason of this post is the following: > I've been working on a conlang derived from Spanish (yeah, I was tired of > seeing so many romlangs!) and I had in mind that it would be the fruit of a > population of Japanese-speakers aquiring the language (the place where it > occurs for now it's that relevant) and even though I worked out the > phonology and some of the grammar, there's things I just don't know, and so, > I'm asking if anyone has an idea and can help me. I would really appreciate > it. > > The questions that were bugging me were: > > *If a language that originally uses stress instead of vowel-length to > distinguish words is influenced by one that does viceversa, would the stress > patterns change and become phonemic length, or just remain the same? For > instance, in a word such as ''lengwáxe'', language, (showing stress) > becoming something like ''rengwa:xe'' where that stressed vowel just becomes > long. Look to see how Japanese has handled English loans. Based on my own cursory observations, English tense vowels are interpreted as long in Japanese, while English lax vowels are interpreted as short. Stressed vowels go either way. > *Consonant clusters that were broken down by intermediate vowels, as in > ''estreja'' -> ''esutureja'', what things can cause these to be reanalysed > as vowels like any other rather than just epenthetic, or looking at it > realistically, would that ''sutur'' cluster become ''str'' again? Here it's > phonology against unstressed vowels that confuses me. Again, look to see what Japanese has done with English loans. (Does Japanese orthography distinguish between epenthetic and "real" vowels?) > *Grammatical change. I supposed that there would be a tendency to not use > the articles 'El, la, los' and possibly number, but I not knowing the > likelyhood haven't been sure. I've been thinking for a while of loanword > grammatical particles such as 'wa' to replace articles, but isn't that a bit > unlikely? Does anyone have suggestions about that? It seems likely to me that at least some articles could become incorporated into the noun word itself. As an example, the word for 'water' might get incorporated as 'era(:)wa' from 'el agua.' This has happened in Haitian Creole, where some articles from French are now just part of the noun itself. A very nice example involves the 'water' word, which is 'dlo' (de l'eau). Not only the article, but the preposition 'de' got sucked in. I don't have my notebooks at hand, so I can't give you any more examples, but a quick google search should reveal some more. Michif, a language blended from Algonkian and French does this as well, if memory serves. Dirk