Talk:Qatama grammar

Hi Sano,
I was wondering, I've seen you state before that you have not thought at all about the internal history of Qatama. Are you actually opposed to having any - after all, despite giving it speakers, dialects etc. you still seem to classify it as a "personalang" - or just not interested in working on the topic? I can discern various hints of linguistic history in it anyway, like the alternation in the pronunciation of <j>. I'm impress'd if you managed to create them in unintentionally. (Qatama's phonology is very cool in general anyway; you have a very uniq but still human "flavor" in there.)

One non-trivial change in particular looks obvious to me: most syllable-initial clusters are of the form stop + sonorant (with "stop" including nasals), but then there's /nʒ/. Also, you have /kj gj mj/, but no /ŋj/. I would take this to mean */ŋj/ → /nʒ/.

(This would probably have to precede the creation of /o/, or its change to something else after /ʒ/. I say "probably" because this could also be just a random hole, similar to the lack of /ŋə mju/. The lack of /tu du/ seems systematic tho, as well as the lack of initial /r/, or of lateral + vowel other than /a/ - but a statistical analysis would be needed to state any of this more securely.)

Oh, and any particular reason you keep classifying /tɬ/ as a fricative, but /ʒ/ as an affricate?

That's all for now I think. --John Vertical 12:02, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Wow, Trop, you've truly been studying the structure of Qatama...I am impressed.

As to your questions;

1. Yes, I have held Qatama to be very personal since its inception. This doesn't necessarily mean that I couldn't at some point develop an internal history for it, but I haven't studied that well enough to speak authoritatively on it, hence, I have avoided the topic.
2. As for /tɬ/ and /ʒ/, I basically wrote up that phonological list based on Wikipedia and never really put that much thought into it.

Qatama is not much more than a collection of sounds that I find pleasing and euphonic. The grammar is loosely based on Mandarin and the primary script Moj, is something that I based on initially Tibetan. The fact that I have a culture, map, dialects etc. is because the language led my mind to imagine such things. I hope this helps to explain Qatama a bit more. I am delighted to see your level of interest and please don't hesitate to ask any more questions that you may have. ~Qang / Sano~