Serf:Echobeats
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ZBB History
Echobeats joined the ZBB on 14 Mar 2004, having been lurking since the previous December. He was introduced to the place (for which he is very grateful!) by Sóren, whom he already knew from another online community, wotmania. His real name is Tim, and he signs all his posts on the ZBB to that effect. He currently holds the rank of Tshur, though preferred the picture for the rank of Gent.
Studies
Echobeats is a second-year undergraduate studying Linguistics at Trinity College, Cambridge. The course does not exist in the first year; last year he studied Classics. He is taking papers in Linguistic Theory, Language History and Use (the two compulsory papers which between them cover everything generally), Phonology/Morphology and the Structure of English.
Music
Echobeats sings second bass in the Chapel Choir of Trinity Hall (not to be confused with Trinity College!). Aside from singing, his main musical instrument is the bagpipes (Great Highland variety), and he also plays the piano and guitar in a somewhat amateur fashion. He has in fact played the bagpipes with the piper featured in the photo on wikipedia; the guy's name is Steve.
Conlangs
Echobeats does not as yet have any full or working conlangs, but has three ideas in his head. The first is...
Eθlŵ
Eθlŵ /'ETlu/ is a language with lots of fricatives, fricativisation of final stops, fairly permissive consonant cluster rules, an evidentiality particle, aspect as a central grammatical feature, three noun genders (moveable, immoveable, intangible), three types of definiteness (definite, indefinite, generic), a distinction between plural number (where each of many items is considered separately) and mass number (where all the items are considered as a collective whole), and adpositions prefixed onto the verb and then repeated at the end of the clause (e.g. I to-went the shops to). Additionally, Eθlŵ uses voicing to make not phonemic but grammatical distinctions: irrealis modality is shown by voicing all the voiceable consonants (all non-sonorant consonants) in the relevant words – usually the entire clause, but possibly a smaller selection of words if this is what it semantically needed.
Eθlŵ has a feature which could be seen as any one of stress accent, pitch accent or tone. However, it is generally agreed to be basically a stress phenomenon. Long vowels come in two kinds: one where "intensity" (a combination of volume and pitch) rises over the course of the vowel, and one where it decreases. These are marked by acute and grave accents respectively. Since long vowels clearly do not take up more than one syllable, and intensity involves pitch, this has been seen by some as a pitch accent. However, since volume as well as pitch is involved, most agree that it is stress, especially since its distribution is governed by the same rules that assign stress generally throughout the language, if you allow them to apply to the historical situation where what are now the long vowels were two identical vowels in separate syllables. See here for the argument on the ZBB about it, and two vocabulary items.
Xurukuttus
Echobeats' second and current favourite idea for a conlang does not have a name as yet, and has only one vocabulary item: xurukuttus [xu4u'kut:us] /xut-ə-kut-tə-s/, meaning "is lived in by me". (Incidentally, the [4] is the intervocalic realisation of /t/). This word is the working name for this conlang until a proper one comes along. The sound and structure of it is meant to reflect my (probably very warped) idealisation of a Native Canadian language. It is a suffixing, agglutinating language with a large number of verb voices, one corresponding to each spatial (or other) relation expressed by prepositions. So while the active voice means "[verb]s" and the passive voice means "is [verb]ed", the inessive voice (as seen in xurukuttus) means "is [verb]ed in"; and so on for the other prepositional relations. Prepositions will exist, but the verbal constructions will be preferable. The language has no voiced stops or fricatives, instead using aspiration in its stop series. Word-final unvoiced stop phonemes are unreleased, contrasting with word-final aspirated stop phonemes, which are released but lose their aspiration. This language also makes extensive use of vowel harmony and umlaut: its ten vowels are arranged on a grid with the same shape as the IPA vowel chart, with lines drawn between them, and no vowel may be more than one position away on the grid from the preceding one. When vowels are two positions away, the vowel in the stem remains as it is and the one in the affix moves towards it. When vowels are three positions apart, both move: this has an umlaut effect in words where the root vowel has to move. However, things are complicated by the fact that the lines linking /ɨ/ to /e ø/ on the front axis and /o/ on the back axis only allow movement in one direction (downward) – this means that in words where the root contains /u/ and the affix contains /e/ or /ø/, or where the root contains /i/ or /y/ and the affix contains /o/, umlaut rather than vowel harmony must occur. Furthermore, adjacent vowels agree in rounding where possible (the rounded/unrounded pairs are i/y, e/ø, and ɑ/ɒ), but /ɨ/, which is half-rounded, is transparent to this, allowing either the rounded or unrounded half of a pair to stand next to it (it might equally well be called /ʉ/, but since it is orthographically <ı> we call it /ɨ/ for convenience). In addition, there is a "transparent vowel" (analysed as underlying /ə/ by some, although there is no [ə] phonetically in the language) – this vowel simply takes on the characteristics of whatever the vowel is in the preceding syllable. This extensive vowel harmony has led to an interesting phenomenon whereby ten basic verbs have no visible roots, but consist instead entirely of affixes which agree in vowel harmony with a vowel that is no longer there. These are called the zero-root verbs.
(Nameless)
Echobeats' third conlang idea is very sketchy, but involves Bantu-like prefixes which change to mark case as well as just number. It has no name or vocabulary as yet.
Etymology
The name Echobeats comes from the terminology of piobaireachd, the Classical music of the Highland Bagpipe. An echo beat is a movement whereby a sequence of two identical notes is broken by a strike, producing a low gracenote between the two notes, and then a the strike is echoed by an identical but longer low note. For example, an echo beat on E consists of an E, a low A gracenote (the strike), another E, a longer low A (the echo), and then an E.
