The BG Language Creation Guide

Example #11: Borrowing Words

Liqupa has borrowed the following words:
  • Borrowing from zvivfa
    Z= voiced syllabic alveolar fricative
    S= alveopalatal fric
    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. The trained eye can, it is said, then read speech by watching the patterns of eddies fromed by all those fricatives...

    Note that zvivfa has reduplication as one of its productive morphological processes. A reduplicated morpheme is intensified: za = red za-za = bright red.


    Updated 4/5/2010