There are 11 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1b. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
From: Wm Annis
2a. Re: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language classes o
From: Padraic Brown
2b. Re: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language classes o
From: Padraic Brown
3a. Re: Stealing words (was: Is this a good place to present Ehenív?)
From: Roger Mills
4a. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: Roger Mills
4b. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: MorphemeAddict
4c. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: Herman Miller
5a. Re: Tone Morphemes and Prepositions
From: Robert Fisch
6a. Re: FW: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language class
From: Roger Mills
7. Lindiga as a Sangari language
From: Herman Miller
Messages
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1a. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 3:35 am ((PDT))
On 2 June 2013 10:44, James Kane <kane...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Well I do remember being a bit shocked when one of our French teachers
> told us that the Parisian pronunciation of 'je ne sais pas' was [Se'pA].
>
> James
It's not only Parisian! I myself will usually say something like [ÊÉËpa]
(informally spelt "ch'ais pas"), [ÊsÉËpa] (spelt "ch'sais pas") or
[ÊÉÌsÉËpa]/[ÊÌ©sÉËpa] (spelt "je sais pas"), depending on the level of
formality (from the most informal to the most formal) and whatever's next
or before in the sentence (it's complicated, Spoken French phonetics are a
mess :) ). I'm from Normandy, and my accent is rather neutral (well, it
used to be in any case. Since I've moved to the Netherlands I've developed
a slight Dutch accent in my French :) . At least so people say :P ).
As for the über-correct "je ne sais pas" (usually pronounced [ÊÉnsÉËpa], or
much more rarely [ÊÉnÉsÉËpa]), you'd only hear it of people reading
something written down, whether reciting from a book or reading a speech.
Politicians might use it, but only in official circumstances and
interviews. You'll hear it in films sometimes, but it's very jarring to my
ears (it's extremely bookish). It will *never* be something someone would
naturally produce in conversational usage.
OK, now I'm really going on holidays, so it'll be a while before I can
reply to any other post in that thread. Don't hesitate to reply though, I
will eventually get to it!
See you all!
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (26)
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1b. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
Posted by: "Wm Annis" wm.an...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 7:54 am ((PDT))
In Na'vi...
For expressions involving language, Na'vi has a fondness for
adverbs.
X nìNa'vi slu pelì'u?
X nì-Na'vi slu pe-lì'u
X ADV-Na'vi become WHAT-word
How do you say 'X' in Na'vi?
Demonstratives with nouns are marked with prefixes, {fì-} for "this,"
{tsa-} for "that," and the question word "which, what" follows the same
pattern, with the prefix {pe+} The '+' is standard Na'vi notation for
"causes lenition," which doesn't occur with /l/, but "which rule?" would
be {pehoren} from {koren} "rule."
--
wm
Messages in this topic (26)
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2a. Re: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language classes o
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 4:08 am ((PDT))
--- On Thu, 5/30/13, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conl...@nvg.org> wrote:
> > Are we allowed to substitute for example, dog or cat, Yemora doesn't
> > have those creatures, they do have creatures that are dog and cat-like.
>
> If it is a sentence where the dog chases the cat for
> example, when you replace dog and cat with other animals,
> the replacment for dog ought to be the sort of animal that
> chases the replacement for cat. And having a chair chase a
> candelabra just won't do!
Unless, of course, this is a perfectly normal, hardly bat an eyelash when
it does happen, sort of event. Why, in the Eastlands of the World, your
average witch's cottage is a veritable "Auntimoany Can Dance" of whirling
cutlery and contredancing candelabras. Although the company disavows all
knowledge of such events, chairs merrily chasing various other pieces of
furniture about the hall is commonplace in those households where one of
Lord Maytagge's Self Actuating Laundry Board Mechanism with Attached
Wringer is in use.
I think the only language in the whole World where this ìsn't allowed is
Ekbatounian, a philosophical language used by the philosophers of Sapo's
Rationalist School (Orthodox) at Alixaundria. You see, Sapo hit upon the
idea of considering events as real only those that can be (rationally)
observed with the eyes firmly closed. In this way, Sapo said, if you
didn't see it, it didn't happen, and therefore, it isn't real. Saponistas
go on and on about the deceptive nature of vision and the trickery of
magic and have declared, therefore, that magic doesn't exist and can't
possibly function in a rational world.
Mind you, shortly after the School purchased on of Lord Maytagge's devices,
several young disciples were caught behaving irrationally, engaging the
said device without any laundry present just to watch the silverware and
plates dance and whirl round the closed-eye heads of the Masters! Things
took a turn for the worse when Master Spindlecock moved suddenly and got
himself in the way of the whirling cutlery, butting heads with one of
Cook's bronze ladles. They Spindlecock opened his eyes for the first time
in decades only to exclaim "Well, bugger me! There goes the privy chair
chasing Master Quoitman's candelabra down the hall!"
At this point, Master Quoitman too opened his eyes and accused Master
Spindlecock of tomfoolery and unorthodoxy of rational vision. But upon
seeing what the other man saw, decided that perhaps Orthodox Rationalism
was insufficient for dealing with the World as it seemed to be going and
a general schism among the philosophers ensued. Those who kept their
eyes firmly shut became known as Pure Land School of Saponific Rationalism,
on account of their holding to the old ways. The Dissenters became known
as Strong Saponific Rationalists, and decided that the only way to
properly analyse the way the World is going is to seal off all avenues of
potential sensory contamination.
In after years, it thus became a commonplace along the stoas of the city
to see groups of old men hollering at each other with their eyes firmly
closed and their ears and noses stuffed full of cotton wadding and their
mouths covered with cloth masks. They've given rise to the popular saying:
n' dused owedere, n' dused olere, n' dused wucare.
Padraic
> t.
Messages in this topic (16)
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2b. Re: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language classes o
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 4:35 am ((PDT))
--- On Wed, 5/29/13, David Peterson <deda...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps this can be added to FrathWiki? Or even better: Perhaps they can
> be added as translations to http://cals.conlang.org!
http://www.frathwiki.com/Syllabus_McWhorteri
Padraic
> David Peterson
> LCS President
> presid...@conlang.org
> www.conlang.org
>
> On May 29, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > John McWhorter has for a couple decades been collecting
> sentences of
> > the sort one doesn't learn how to say in
> second-language classes.
> > Vocabulary words are easy to acquire; nice and obvious
> (SAE)
> > inflectional categories invariably get their dedicated
> lessons; but
> > there are types of sentences which neither of these
> naturally cover
> > but which nonetheless are common in day-to-day usage,
> and prone to
> > idiomaticity. (There are some overlooked lexical
> areas in there as
> > well.) He has very graciously sent me his list,
> and I hope I'm not
> > running afoul of him by reproducing it below!
Messages in this topic (16)
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3a. Re: Stealing words (was: Is this a good place to present Ehenív?)
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 10:04 am ((PDT))
I've done a lot of this in Kash, stealing from the variety of Indonesian langs.
I'm familiar with; some Gwr proto-forms are stolen, but not recognizable by the
time sound change works on them. I think Prevli has largely been immune....
One of my favorite Kash words is _calupa_ [tSa'lupa] 'great big mess' inspired
by a Taco Bell add campaign of some years back.It is actually "borrowed" from
Gwr _luq fa_ (with sandhi pronounced ['lup:a], meaning not yet assigned**) +
the Kash "excessive" prefix ca-
**Just checked the dict.. It could mean _explosion alert_ (their equiv. of
"Fire in the hole!!"
--- On Thu, 5/30/13, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
(snipalot)
> >> (and is the word for "queen" really "latifa"???)
> >
> >Nothing wrong with inside jokes. Rejistanian uses tons of them.
> >Kamakawi does as well (pika!). And I don't know any constructed
> >language which does not.
Speaking of inside jokes, Tatari Faran has quite a lot of them.
The interrogative noun _sii_, for example, is pronounced exactly like
the English "see?", but means "what" -- and this is no coincidence! It
was inspired by an attempt to weird out my roommate at the time by
deliberately making English-sounding words mean something totally
different. Especially since the corresponding neuter NP is _sii so_
["si: sO], a caricature of "see-saw".
Another TF inside joke is _karen_ (pronounced [ka"4En]), meaning "shoe",
with apologies to women named Karen who may own a lot of shoes. :-P
A very obscure inside joke is the 2PL pronoun _huna_: it was a retcon
from the phrase _san huna_ "you(pl) people", which was originally
inspired by the word "kahuna". (Don't ask me what the connection is,
though. I just thought it was funny for "kahuna", suitably distorted, to
mean "y'all".)
Many TF words are inspired by Malay (the most familiar Austronesian lang
to me, and hence a good source of inspiration since I wanted TF to have
a vaguely Austronesian feel), but with the meanings often twisted into
unrecognizable forms. For example _suka_ in Malay means "to like", but
in TF it means "to follow" (after all, if you like someone you'd follow
them, right? Not that I condone stalking, though!). And _bumei_ in TF
means to sit, and _bumi_ in Malay means earth or ground: the original
meaning of _bumei_ is to sit on the ground, but I disguised it by
allowing it to refer to sitting in general. Then _petsa_ "to explode"
from Malay _pecah_ [p@"tSah] "to break into pieces". Near-direct
borrowings include _sarap_ "delicious" (Malay _sedap_ -- in TF, medial
/d/ is expressed as /r/ [4]) and _mimbi_ "dreams" (Malay _mimpi_). A
funny distortion of Malay is _misai_, which in Malay means "moustache",
but in TF means "deer". I just find the idea of a deer with a moustache
totally hilarious.
Some TF words are deliberate homophones of other languages I know, with
meanings similarly distorted. E.g. _bihuun_ [bi"hu:n] "powdered pepper",
a distortion of /bi1 hun4/ in my L1, which literally means rice powder,
but which refers to a kind of thin rice noodle dish, which I usually
liked to eat with copious amounts of pepper. And _sahai_ "to slay, to
kill", a portamenteau of Mandarin /sha1/ "to slay" and /shang1 hai4/ "to
cause harm".
So yeah. Lots of puns and obscure inside jokes going on in Tatari Faran
(the above are merely the tip of the iceberg). Most are suitably
disguised so that TF can, at least in theory, stand up to scrutiny as a
naturalistic conlang. :)
Messages in this topic (20)
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4a. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 10:12 am ((PDT))
I think back in the late 19th/early 20th C. someone made some proposals (a
Chilean IIRC-- Andrés Bello ???).
About the only one that ever caught on ( and not universally) was the use of
"y" for initial unstressed /i/, which survives in a few variant proper names--
Ynez, Yglesias etc.
--- On Sat, 6/1/13, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote:
From: MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: English Orthography in the Future
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Date: Saturday, June 1, 2013, 11:22 PM
I'd much rather have ð edh than þ thorn for th, mostly because þ is so
similar to p.
I'm also in favor of a spelling reform for Spanish, which could do it much
more straightforwardly.
stevo
On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Matthew George <matt....@gmail.com> wrote:
> As am I - but only if it's pointy instead of rounded. It's called 'thorn',
> it should evoke that association. The curvy, bulbous 'thorn' is just a bad
> idea. And it's easier to confuse with either 'b' or 'p'.
>
> Matt G.
>
Messages in this topic (18)
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4b. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" lytl...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 10:49 am ((PDT))
That seems like a step backward.
stevo
On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Roger Mills <romi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think back in the late 19th/early 20th C. someone made some proposals (a
> Chilean IIRC-- Andrés Bello ???).
>
> About the only one that ever caught on ( and not universally) was the use
> of "y" for initial unstressed /i/, which survives in a few variant proper
> names-- Ynez, Yglesias etc.
>
> --- On Sat, 6/1/13, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From: MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: English Orthography in the Future
> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> Date: Saturday, June 1, 2013, 11:22 PM
>
> I'd much rather have ð edh than þ thorn for th, mostly because þ is so
> similar to p.
>
> I'm also in favor of a spelling reform for Spanish, which could do it much
> more straightforwardly.
>
> stevo
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Matthew George <matt....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > As am I - but only if it's pointy instead of rounded. It's called
> 'thorn',
> > it should evoke that association. The curvy, bulbous 'thorn' is just a
> bad
> > idea. And it's easier to confuse with either 'b' or 'p'.
> >
> > Matt G.
> >
>
Messages in this topic (18)
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4c. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "Herman Miller" hmil...@prismnet.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 11:13 am ((PDT))
On 6/2/2013 1:09 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
> As I learned from Michael Everson (also by the way a thorn fan:
> http://evertype.com/blog/thorn/), this is the same mistake -- to
> shamelessly take the typographers' side -- made by the European
> Commission in introducing the euro symbol, whose aspect ratio and bar
> widths and everything else were specified to complete unyielding
> precision: meaning that if you wanted to design a typeface of any
> other constitution, your choices were to either have the euro symbol
> stick out like a sore thumb or be Technically Not Actually the Euro
> Symbol.
> http://www.fontshop.com/blog/fontmag/002/02_euro/
I had no idea. I guess the euro symbol in my Thryomanes font is actually
a Technically Not Actually the Euro Symbol, then.
I guess they expect everyone to print all prices in Futura or Century
Gothic?
I've tried to keep a consistent style when adding new characters to
Thryomanes, but there've been so many additions to Unicode over the
years. Many of the characters I'm not sure what they're supposed to look
like in the first place.
Messages in this topic (18)
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5a. Re: Tone Morphemes and Prepositions
Posted by: "Robert Fisch" robert.fi...@rocketmail.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 10:14 am ((PDT))
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 09:11:33 -0300
From: Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Tone Morphemes and Prepositions
>Don't you have a neutral tone?
2013/5/30 Robert Fisch <robert.fi...@rocketmail.com>:
> I've been making a tonal language where there are six contour tone
> morphemes. >The three that end on falling tones mark verb forms/adjectives
> and the three that >end on rising ones mark noun forms. I am having problems
> with coming up with >prepositions and other words that are neither
> verbs/adjectives nor nouns. I was >thinking they could have consonants as
> syllable nuclei instead of the tonal >vowels, but that makes the words hard
> to say, and there are only a limited >number of words I can come up with in
> this way. Do you have any suggestions?
>Have you got no level tones? That would be very unusual; contour tones imply
>>level tones is one of these posited implicational universals.
>If your language is meant to be naturalistic, then there's no way the split is
>gonna >be this clean anyway!
>Well, in most natural languages prepositions descend from nouns and verbs
>that got suitably worn down, so that's one way you could go.
>BTW, why would a consonantal nucleus be toneless? Tones are features of
>syllables (sometimes of words), not of vowels, as far as I know.
>Well, it depends on the phonology of the language in question. I can just
>about >conceive of a proto-language with syllable structure *CVR(...) where
>the element >R could either be a resonant or a glottal consonant (but not both
>in the same >syllable), and then historical V+resonant becomes (default-toned)
>syllabic >resonant >while historical V+glottal undergoes tonogenesis with loss
>of the >glottal.
>But tones càn be realised on any voiced segment, and certainly the ordinary
>>expectation would be that all (voiced) syllable nuclei can bear them.
>You could limit which syllable shapes can be tone-bearing. For
>example, checked syllables (short vowel, non-sonorant coda) may not
>have inherent tone. Or tone could be limited to heavy syllables.
Thanks for your suggestions, guys! I do already have two level tones, but I
will definitely make use of that neutral tone.
Messages in this topic (6)
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6a. Re: FW: translation exercises: McWhorter's 500 things language class
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 12:54 pm ((PDT))
FWIW, I've saved the Syllabus McWhorteri and will work on it. At first glance,
it looks like Kash can handle many of these. Gwr, Prevli-- remains to be seen
:-((((
Messages in this topic (2)
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7. Lindiga as a Sangari language
Posted by: "Herman Miller" hmil...@prismnet.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 1:43 pm ((PDT))
You may recall that Tirelat and Jarda originally started out as personal
languages, before I decided to adapt them to make them into Sangari
languages. For a time, Jarda was a language spoken by raccoon people,
and I think there were some weasel people at one time who were speakers
of Tirelat. But now they are both Sangari languages, and although Jarda
as a Sangari language is still a little rough around the edges, Tirelat
has adapted well.
There's one more personal language that I have yet to find a place for,
and that's Lindiga. For a time I thought it could be a language for the
Mirnda or Jirra people, and later I considered it for the Verrilin. But
I think it's better to concentrate on one or two worlds, so I've been
exploring the possibility of making Lindiga a Sangari language.
The first thing I've done is to fix the spelling, making it more
phonemic and less quirky.
a [ÉÌ]
e [É] or [É]
ê [e]
f [f] or [v]
i [i] or [j]
k [k] or [É¡]
l [l]
ḷ [É]
Š[ɬ]
ÅÌ£ [ɬ̢] (voiceless retroflex lateral fricative, not an offical IPA symbol)
m [m]
n [n]
Ṡ[ɳ]
Å [Å]
o [É]
ö [ɵ]
p [p] or [b]
r [r]
Ṡ[ɽ]
s [s] or [z]
á¹£ [Ê] or [Ê]
t [t] or [d]
á¹ [Ê] or [É]
u [u] or [w]
ü [Ê]
x [x] or [É£]
The name of the language in this new scheme is "á¹£i-liá¹á¹iÅa", pronounced
[ÊiËliɳÉiÅa]. As a native writing system, I've been using Teascript,
which as a featural alphabet has a lot in common with the other Sangari
writing systems.
Some other changes are obvious. Words for humans are redefined to refer
to Sangari, e.g. "xaṣḷa" [ËxÉÊÉÉ] now means "adult male Sangari" and
"köfu" [Ëkɵvu] means "adult female Sangari". Words for animals and
plants are either redefined to refer to native animals and plants of
Sarangia (e.g. "miua" [ËmiwÉ] = Tirelat "ghazaar" [É£aËzaËr]), or removed
from the vocabulary ("liska", a direct borrowing from Czech "liška").
I'm going to need new color words, but I was going to need new words
anyway for those, since those go back to the time when I was still using
mangled English for some words. So "pinki" for "pink" would have to go,
even if the Sangari people could see the color "pink". I'll also need to
replace "ntiki" for "indigo", "fiḷá¹i" for "violet", and others.
Unfortunately, one of my example sentences is "the quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog", which uses three of these words that need to be
replaced (brown, fox, and dog)!
sastu liske piarni sipsi ita tueku nisuêi
Ø-sast-u liska-e piarn-i sips-i ita tuek-u nisu-êi
3s.ABS-jump-PF fox-ERG brown-ERG quick-ERG over dog-LOC lazy-LOC
Messages in this topic (1)
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