Re: Hey, some Aelya!

[Geoff Eddy <geoff@morven.compulink.co.uk>]

Hi Clinton,

you wrote:

[details about Aelya cases]

> Anyone have any ideas of how things should be assigned? PLease feel free
> to do whatever...

Hm. Your ideas for the Quenya cases are fine; I'd use them without
hesitation,
if it were my decision... For the others, perhaps cases with similar
meanings
might take roughly similar forms (e.g. in the patterns of vowels and
consonants)... just a thought.

>         another thing, too. There is a class of noun in Aelya that
> involves some fairly big changes, the -y- class. In oblique cases, the y
> drops from these nouns. What I'm not sure of is how to handle clusters
> after the y drops, or what to do with markings that create clusters. Some
> examples:

>         dawyn 'spider' > pl. dauna (dawyn-a>dawn-a>dauna)

This one is particularly nice.

>         tobyr 'well' > pl. tobra
>         bradyn 'salmon' > pl. bradna /brann@/
>           pat. bradne/pl. bradne or bradnen
>           all. bradnan?/pl. bradnannar?

Presumably you're wondering how to handle consonat clusters which result
from
the loss of -y- but which the phonology of the language doesn't permit?
I've
had precisely this problem with some of my languages. One idea is to
have
rules for simplifying them, but this does sometimes result in different
roots
having identical case-forms.

Alternatively, invent some rules for changing sounds in certain
situations.
For example, hypothetically speaking, you might have:

/b/ -> /u/ : abyn -> auna, contrasting with "tobyr" above; to me, /bn/
seems
more likely to change than /br/

/d/ -> /i/ : bradyn -> braina (inspired by Irish lenition of slender
/d/)

Obviously a lot of the actual rules depend on the phonology of Aelya,
but
these two might work nicely in a language with an Irish-derived element.

Hope this is of some use!

Regards,

Geoff
-- 
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