Trans: Shoeflower Nose Man

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
>If you can translate a sentence such as: "if I see the man who walked on my
>flowers, I'm gonna make him eat his dirty shoes through his nose!" :))
without
>grammatical difficulties (I'm not talking about a lack of vocabulary), I'd
say
>your language is pretty complete.
Hmm.

Dunamy:
"Syút sai aum ara kau, ä pivaug uffa mau flävsa, mihgi aufpi ar'ím piari
tar' ara syós vif év nus!"
/Sut "s@.i Am "@.4@ kA & pi"vAg "U.f@ mA "fl&v.s@ "mI.gi "Af.pi @."4im
pi."@.4i "t@.4w@.4a Sos vIf ev nUs/

    If   see  1SG.PRES NC  man, that walk.INV over my  flower.PL.PAST,
    Syút sa.i au.m     ara kau, ä    pi.vaug  uffa mau fläv.s.a

    make   1SG.FUT NC-him IMP-eat dirty NC  shoe.PL using 3s-POSS nose
    mihg.i aufp.i  ar'ím  pi.ar.i tara  ara syo.s   vif   év      nus

The kind of person who'd say that would probably say [s@] for <sai> and
["mI.J\j\i] for <mihgi> though.  The palatalization and the dropping of
verbal -i after vowels is a feature of the speech of people who .. (I don't
know how quite to explain it) ... hmm, say, galoots and children.

There's two other things I'm considering.  One is, whether prepositions
should become postpositions.  (Either one feels possible...)  The other is a
spelling change... to make it more Germanic, somewhat, changing the rule for
how a lax or tense vowel (E/e I/i U/u.. not sure if an O/o opposition exists
yet, or even if there's really O at all...) is unmarked with 1 and 0
syllable-final consonants following rspctvly to two or zero and one,
morpheme-finally.  Then it'd be spelled:

"Syut saih aum ara kau, ä pivaug uffa mau flävsa miggih aufpih ar'im piarih
tar' ara syos viff ev nuss!"

(or maybe [i] could be <y> instead of <ih> for space-saving in situations
like this...)

"Syut say aum ara kau, ä pivaug uffa mau flävsa miggy aufpy ar'im piary tar'
ara syos viff ev nuss!"

(But I don't like that, because <y> is normally [j\] and [Z].  Hmm.  Well,
ambiguity doesn't seem to be that bad...)


    *Muke!

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