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Re: Trans: 'I love you'

From:Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
Date:Thursday, April 19, 2001, 15:32
- Celvechic (formerly, Galvinic-E, the Arabic-based dead language voted
here some time ago):

evoasteex [?EvOVste:x] 'I love you' (with one of quite a few possible
synonyms for 'love')

The reason why I add this with a delay is that I had to invent
an appropriate way to present the morphological structure. It
seems that this is impossible without reducing the utterance to
its morphonologically underlying form (the symbols used for
'underlying phonemes' are absolutely conventional):

?*e-E-    v*o-E-t*e-t*e-    A-     k*e-     0
1Sg(subj) love (pres. stem) indic. 2Sg(obj) [+pausal position]

The present stem of the verb 'to love' is derived from the root
v*o-t*e-t*e by applying the vocalization model 1E2(I)3-.

'Pausal position' means that no word follows that could establish
an immediate syntactic connection with the form being analyzed.

Interestingly, emphasizing the subject or the object requires a rather
unusual transformation.

With stress on 'I':

evoastake ena [?EvOVstVkE ?EnV](addressing a male being)
evoastaki ena [?EvOVstVki ?EnV](addressing a female being)

(_ena_ being the pausal subject form of 'I')

With stress on 'you':

evoastake iixevuix (addressing a male being)
evoastaki iixevuix (addressing a female being)

(_iixevuix_ [?i:xEvujx] being the pausal object form of 'you')

In both cases, the form of the verb becomes non-pausal and now
distinguishes between the genders of the object.

You may think Celvechic is designed to be a bit esoterical - which is
absolutely correct ;)


Basilius

Reply

Bjorn Kristinsson <bjornkri@...>