There are 4 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
From: Njenfalgar
1.2. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
From: Roman Rausch
2. TECH: SIL Toolbox - Markers
From: Zach Wellstood
3a. Re: English Orthography in the Future
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
Messages
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1.1. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
Posted by: "Njenfalgar" njenfal...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 2:28 pm ((PDT))
2013/6/2 George Corley <gacor...@gmail.com>
> Granted, there's issues in other places: I've known a few people who have
> taken Japanese classes, and they apparently always start with the
> grammatical polite forms. I often wonder if their conversations sound too
> formal to Japanese speakers in some situations, possibly even off-putting.
>
Having learnt Vietnamese the same way, I have come to the conclusion that
it kind-of makes sense. If your first ventures into actually speaking the
language with real-life humans is with friends, and you use the polite
forms, they might correct you, they might laugh, they might do might do
many things, but there's no reason they would go hostile. If, on the other
hand, your first time is in a very formal setting (which is quite common if
you're in the country for tourism) and you only know intimate forms (many
of which are identical with denigrating and hostile forms in Vietnamese)
you might fare less well.
David
--
Yésináne gika asahukúka ha'u Kusikéla-Kísu yesahuwese witi nale lálu wíke
uhu tu tinitíhi lise tesahuwese. Lise yésináne, lina, ikéwiyéwa etinizáwa
búwubúwu niyi tutelíhi uhu yegeka.
http://njenfalgar.conlang.org/
Messages in this topic (28)
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1.2. Re: "How do you say X (in LANGUAGE)?"
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" ara...@mail.ru
Date: Mon Jun 3, 2013 6:03 am ((PDT))
>Granted, there's issues in other places: I've known a few people who have
>taken Japanese classes, and they apparently always start with the
>grammatical polite forms. I often wonder if their conversations sound too
>formal to Japanese speakers in some situations, possibly even off-putting.
All Japanese books and courses I've seen were well-structured in this respect:
Having started with polite forms, they spend a great deal of time in teaching
you colloquial Japanese, what goes on there and when to use it. Usually there
are texts set within the appropriate social environments for practice, and so
on.
In comparison: Within the seven years of French in school over here in Germany
we were actively disencouraged from using colloquial French. The reason given
for this was along the lines that it does not behove a foreigner to talk like
that. But even if this is true, we weren't properly taught to understand it
either.
It seems to me that the teaching of Japanese has a much shorter history, so
that one is free to use modern methods instead of sticking to established
traditions.
Messages in this topic (28)
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2. TECH: SIL Toolbox - Markers
Posted by: "Zach Wellstood" zwellst...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 5:33 pm ((PDT))
liyaá' ri!
I'm just getting into Toolbox for my lexicon needs. The learning curve has
been almost as bad as FontForge (for me, anyway). I finally modified
the Dictionary
Factory project
<http://www-01.sil.org/computing/toolbox/techniques.htm>enough for my
needs. I now have my lexicon structured this way:
\lx Lexeme
\ph Phonological Form
\ps Part of Speech
\de Definition
\nt Notes
\ec Roots
Unfortunately, when I modified the original project, I didn't know what the
\ec field was intended for, nor did I know that the MDF skips it when
exporting to an RTF file. In the MDF export options, I've unchecked \ec on
the "exclude from export" list, but it *still* will not show up in the
exported RTF file. I've found out that if I can change it to \et
(etymology) or \eg (etymological gloss), they will be included upon export,
but whenever I try to change \ec to \eg I get an error message, "cannot
merge markers."
Does anyone know how I can merge markers or fix this so that my beloved \ec
field will show up? The documentation is quite poor/outdated and I haven't
found anything on google regarding this error or its solution.
I've already tried modifying the source code of the MDF program to include
it, but that hasn't gotten me very far.
Thanks in advance!
Zach
Messages in this topic (1)
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3a. Re: English Orthography in the Future
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" j_mach_w...@shared-files.de
Date: Sun Jun 2, 2013 11:55 pm ((PDT))
In a recent Spanish orthography reform, the use of the accents was slightly
simplified, dropping the accents on monosyllables such as "fue" (formerly,
"fué"). While Spanish spelling can be mapped perfectly on pronunciation
(ambiguities are virtually nonexistent), there are a few ambiguities when
mapping pronunciation on spelling. These are: /b/ â â¨vâ© or â¨bâ©, vowel
onset â
â
or â¨hâ©, and, for a vast majority of Spanish speakers, /s/ â â¨sâ©
or â¨zâ©,
and, for virtually all Spanish speakers, /Ê/ â â¨yâ© or â¨llâ©. In some
varieties, there might be additional ambiguities, namely syllable coda â¨sâ©
vs
â
, syllable coda â¨râ© vs. â¨lâ©, and consonant clusters.
Apart from these ambiguities, there are some regular alternations, namely the
regular alternations between â¨câ©, â¨gâ© (both before â¨eâ©, â¨iâ©) on
one hand and
â¨zâ©, â¨jâ© on the other hand, and the regular alternation between initial
â¨râ©
and non-initial â¨rrâ© or, in a few cases, between non-final â¨iâ© and
final â¨yâ©.
Also, the use of the acute accent â in spite of being totally regular â
remains a mystery to many (I guess this is because it is taught too early,
maybe at the age of 8 or 10, at an age when most children do not yet grasp
these fairly abstract rules).
While Spanish orthography looks like a model of regularity to people used to
French or German orthography, it is less regular than Italian or Finnish
orthography.
As for English orthography, I think it is extremely unlikely that it is going
to change anytime soon. Two factors: The very high degree of English literacy
and the use of English in numerous countries around the globe. Maybe at some
point in the future English will have the same fate as Latin did: The spoken
language becomes so distant from the written language that people don't
relate to the written language any more but instead begin to write the spoken
language. In the case of Latin, this process started after about 1000 years
and was completed after about 1500 years. If these numbers are applied to
English, it will not happen for at least another 500 years. Mind you that the
comparison is not easy, since in the case of Latin, there was a very high
degree of illiteracy.
--
grüess
mach
On Sun, 2 Jun 2013 13:49:03 -0400, MorphemeAddict wrote:
>That seems like a step backward.
>
>stevo
>
>
>On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Roger Mills 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 wrote:
>>
>> From: MorphemeAddict
>> 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
Messages in this topic (19)
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