User:Ceige/SuperSAE

Guiding Inspirations &al.

  • French and its interesting colloquialisms and grammar
  • German and its grammatical similarities to French
  • Luxemburgish and its grammar, phonology and orthography
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Italian
  • und so weiter

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European - note stuff like mandatory personal pronouns kick the bucket in some colloquial phrasings.

Phonology

  • /r/ is probably flexible with a guttural pronunciation being prestigious in normal speech. /r/ after vowels can have reduced salience as a consonant.
  • A bunch of vowels - I need to check my phone for this.
  • p b f v m t d (ts? dz?) s z l r n (č š (d)ž?) j k g (x? h?)

Orthography

  • ch vs tch vs sch vs tsch vs j vs g vs tsch?
  • VsV = /VzV/
  • Double letters have a role; double vowels will be harder
  • a ae e è é ê ei ie i ui ue u ou o ò ó ô oe ue oa ai au eu? úûùíìîï? äëö? e = /E/ and /ə/

Grammar in General

  • Suppletion is dope.

The Noun Phrase

  • Adjectives can go before and after the noun
  • Articles come before the noun phrase
  • Nouns may mark for male, female, and plural at least; but not necessarily on the noun
  • Prepositions dominate
  • There may or may not be a genitive -'s clitic, and gender/plurality marking may be neutralised for predicate adjectives (both are fairly Germanic though despite French's importance here).

The Verb Phrase

  • The past tense is formed with "have + [verb past participle]"
  • Most verb forms (including things like the future) use auxiliary verbs (the future should probably have a w/v- onset, cf. werden, will, vais)
  • There is still a series of directly inflected verbs though using suffixes just to show this stage existed at some point. Cf. French and German.
  • Suppletive verbs are cool. vais vs allons
  • Past participles are formed with -t
  • Present participles are formed with -ant or -and; the jury is still out.
  • There is at least a distinction between singular and plural verbs (currently thinking: -e and -on(s) as a compromise from -ons/-ez/-ent and -en?)

Pronominal Problems

  • French has je moi me mons distinction; German has ich mich mir mein distinction. Still a lot of grammatical relics for both and the same number too, but with caveats...