Hallo conlangers!

On Saturday 04 August 2012 08:53:42 R A Brown wrote:

> On 03/08/2012 18:40, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> 
> > On Friday 03 August 2012 09:26:02 R A Brown wrote:
> [LIVA]
> [...]
> >> Thus he has a matrix of 8 x 4 = 32 phonemes.
> > 
> > Which is just asking for being written in a Tengwar-like
> > featural script!
> 
> Yep - even a featural use of groups of five bits   ;)

Of course, in a very straightforward way!  Très élegant!
 
> >> But revisiting this, I'm not so happy about his
> >> 'laterals'.  The IPA chart gives symbols for his
> >> dental/alveolar, palatal and velar laterals, the spaces
> >> for labial (and labiodental) lateral is blanked out,
> >> meaning the sound is not humanly possible. Claudio
> >> described his 'labial lateral' thus: "[the sound] is
> >> obtained by putting the tongue tip between the lips
> >> and pronouncing a sort of 'L'."
> > 
> > An elegant, symmetric system that fails at the limits of
> > the human articulatory tract.  There is no way fixing
> > that - you have to choose one of the following three:
> > 
> > 1. Include an abstract "phoneme" that nobody can
> > pronounce. 2. Break the symmetry by filling in a phoneme
> > that doesn't really fit its place in the grid. 3. Leave a
> > gap in the grid (which also breaks the symmetry).
> 
> Yes - all true.  But I can pronounce as sound as described
> by Claudio, tho it sounds very odd.  He does allow
> allophones for the 'labial lateral' and the velar lateral,
> namely, [w] for the labial and a "back vibrant" for the
> velar lateral. but i find no indication of what he means by
> "back vibrant".

Perhaps the best way to treat this is to dispose of the label
"lateral" and use something like /w l j ʀ/ here.

> > Such problems tend to crop up in conlangs which try to be
> > more regular than practical.
> 
> Yep.
> 
> >> His phonotactics were interesting - but I won't go into
> >> them here, except to say that they meant that "a string
> >> of phonemes is completely parsable both in written and
> >> spoken speech.  Blank spaces or pauses thus are not
> >> necessary, and words can be written as a continuous
> >> string."  But he did add: "Nevertheless, bland spaces
> >> are okay as a visual help."
> > 
> > I.e., a self-segregating morphology?
> 
> Yes, indeed.
> 
> As much as those beasts
> 
> > are out of place in naturalistic languages, in a loglang
> > it absolutely makes sense!
> 
> Exactly so - and Liva is intended to be a loglang.

It is, and quite an elegant one, as far as I can tell from a
brief glance at the grammar.  It seems less arbitrary than
Lojban, which has natlanginess intruding in its phonology
and its SVO word order.  (As much as I am a naturalist in
artlanging, loglangs are something entirely different and
should not try to be "naturalistic" at all!)

> >> It is the sort of thing I have attempted in BrSc and
> >> its various descendants.  Also I have long adopted, and
> >> quite independently, the same principle as Claudio:
> >> "There are two main word classes: semantic words and
> >> syntactic words .... Semantic words are not
> >> distinguished as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc."
> > 
> > All of which, of course, are predicate words which means
> > that there is good reason to treat them alike in a
> > loglang.  I do treat them alike in Quetch (though I don't
> > claim that Quetch was a loglang).  In Quetch, "semantic
> > words" are consonants and "syntactic words" are vowels,
> > which I hope is a halfways practical way of implementing
> > a speedtalk.
> 
> I think a case can also be made for treating semantic words
> as a single class of "full words" in artlangs that aim at
> naturalism.

It is at least not impossible, as languages such as Kēlen show.
I have heard that Basque and Welsh at least get close in their
colloquial variants, and I am considering a descendant of Old
Albic which likewise has only a single class of content words
(basically, verbal noun constructions, which already exist in
plenty in Old Albic, will have crowded out all constructions
with finite verbs).
 
> My hard-copy of the language is of version 2.1 of September
> 1997.  I find a later version, 4.2 of January 2002 is
> available on:
> http://www.oocities.org/gataspus/liva.htm

Thank you for the link.  This indeed seems to be an interesting
language!
 
> {KINYA]
> [...]
> 
> >> Yes - I ordinary text copy of Maurizio's description of
> >> the
> 
> That should be "I have an ordinary text copy...."
> 
> By ordinary text, I meant ASCII.
> 
> >> language which I could easily put into pdf format and
> >> post on my website.
> 
> Easily - but time consuming if one wants to move from ASCII
> plain text into the early 21st century   ;)

It would be nice to see that grammar.  You seem to be speaking
about an interesting language, but Google yields nothing of
relevance.

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