User:Radius/Sketch

Hmm, I think I'd like to sketch out a few notions I've had about Buruya Nzaysa.

• It would be good to get some of the vowel values moved around, such that the vowel alternations that litter the language will be made more distinct. Alternations like ə-e, o-ɔ, etc., that are important to the grammar but too close together to keep easily distinct in unstressed positions. Either those alternations need to collapse, or they need to become more distinct.
• Following that, some mild height-based vowel harmony might produce some interesting results, given the vowel alternations. Like the case pair for interrogative determiners, ewə-ewa, and given (for example) ə > ɨ > i and harmony like e > ɛ / _Ca, e > i / _Ci, we could get the much more vivid contrast iwi-ɛwa. Or with additional a > ɔ and w-deletion before back round vowels, iwi-ɛɔ.

  I like this. Very much. Actually, I was already considering to add one or two allophonic rules pointing towards such harmony... Cedh

• L-deletion before back vowels (via a back-vowel conditioned l>w step followed by the w-loss in the same environment) would give us an interesting vowel-only set of case-definiteness prefixes on nouns, especially after harmony applies to them.
• And even more interesting if the prenasalized phonemes lose prenasalization in initial position (or even all nasals lost #_C), only to have the nasal reappear after prefixes.

  Prenasals only occur initially in B.Nz.; they systematically change with the addition of any prefix, and in compounds as well. This mutation rule, which is probably stronger than any vowel alternation, needs to become first unproductive and then obscured before you can do what you describe. I like the idea though. Cedh

Meanwhile...

• The auxSOV pattern seems like a regional characteristic, but even so, auxSOV has a distinct cross-linguistic tendency to shift to SOauxV. Trying it here could have some interesting results, especially if the auxes then fuse to the front of the verb. That would result in a synthetic, polypersonal-marking verb. I've suggested this path before for other proposed Eastern Edastean projects, which are all ripe for the same type of change, but I don't think it's been actually tried yet. (Unless that's what Zompist was going to do, but his Naidda daughter doesn't appear to be something we're going to see anytime soon.)

  Mmmmh, tasty :) Cedh