The BG Language Creation Guide

Words for Borrowing

Please use the words you acquired in class for the word borrowing assignment if at all possible. If circumstances have conspired against you, I may ask you to use these words for the language contact homework. I have provided all the information you will need.

Group III:
Language Name: zvivfa
Created by Sasha Suffipuss

The Zvivfa language was once thought unlearnable by outsiders due to the wildly unlikely number of fricatives it contains. Note that adult fluent speakers can communicate silently by submersing themselves in water up to just below their noses and speaking below the surface of the water. The trained eye can, it is said, then read speech by watching the patterns of eddies formed by all those fricatives.

Z= voiced syllabic alveolar fricative
S= voiceless alveopalatal fricative

Note that zvivfa has reduplication as one of its productive morphological processes. A reduplicated morpheme is intensified. Thus:
- : za = red
- za-za = bright red.
- flood: fufa-fufa-vuv
  river-river-distributed
  (Distributed = spread around).
- boat: i-zuz-fufa
  above-(not-touching)-river
  zuz is used when two objects may not come into contact i-zuz = float
- the sond of flowing water: sZsZS
- fungus: sia-sia-ve
  slippery-slippery-plant
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Updated 4/5/2010