There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
1.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
1.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
1.4. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
1.5. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
1.6. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Padraic Brown
1.7. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: David McCann
1.8. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: R A Brown
1.9. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: H. S. Teoh
2a. Emphatic "even" in nat and conlangs.
From: Leonardo Castro
2b. Re: Emphatic "even" in nat and conlangs.
From: Daniel Bowman
2c. Re: Emphatic "even" in nat and conlangs.
From: Roger Mills
3a. Re: Language and aging
From: Leonardo Castro
4a. Re: Spanish s as h
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
5a. Re: Equivalent to Grand Master Plans in Proper Linguistics?
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Messages
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1.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" ever...@evertype.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 7:29 am ((PDT))
On 17 Jun 2013, at 01:10, Rich Harrison <r...@harrison.net> wrote:
> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
> latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
> Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
> only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words.
No, Sona used uppercase letters to indicate assimilated foreign words (like
Ruso 'Russian'). Non-assimilated foreign words would be just written in italics
or something.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" ever...@evertype.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 7:29 am ((PDT))
On 17 Jun 2013, at 01:15, C. Brickner <tepeyach...@embarqmail.com> wrote:
> Senjecas is unicameral, using only the lower case. I figure that, since
> there are no capital letters in the various Senjecan scripts, why use them in
> transliterations into the Latin alphabet?
Because there's no reason to jettison the useful reading conventions of the
Latin script.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" ever...@evertype.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 7:30 am ((PDT))
On 17 Jun 2013, at 01:27, Larry Sulky <larrysu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> All my conlangs -- Konya, Lume, Elomi, and Qakwan, use capitalisation only on
> proper names.
And why wouldn't you help your readers navigate a paragraph by beginning
sentences with capital letters?
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.4. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" ever...@evertype.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 7:48 am ((PDT))
On 17 Jun 2013, at 01:42, Ph. D. <p...@phillipdriscoll.com> wrote:
> The auxlang Suma is written in all lowercase, even the first letter of a
> sentence. The only exception is non-assimulated foreign words and place names
> which are written in all capitals.
Bad design, in my view.
On 17 Jun 2013, at 02:58, Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> What counts as "traditional" capitalisation? English? German? French?
> Mandarin?
Putting capital letters at the beginnings of sentences and at the beginnings of
personal names. Sometimes other entities (like week-day or month names) are
also capitalized.
On 17 Jun 2013, at 07:06, Zach Wellstood <zwellst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Absolutely all of Åaá siri is written in a lowercase romanization because
> for some reason I found that including uppercase letters is extremely
> aesthetically displeasing.
Why bother with it in English then?
On 17 Jun 2013, at 20:40, DM <decadent.muf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I also tend to find the use of capitals to be aesthetically displeasing,
What does that actually mean? You've lived with them in the Latin script all
your life.
On 19 Jun 2013, at 03:41, Douglas Koller <douglaskol...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> From: carra...@gmail.com
>
>> The Gravgaln script doesn't have capital letters (actually none of my alien
>> scripts do), but I use normal English conventions in the Romanization, since
>> not doing so would look like some kind of e.e. cummings poem. Far too
>> cutsie for my taste.
>
> Exactly. Plus I find it's just nice in the romanization to have some of the
> familiar landmarks to assist in reading.
Yes. I find it particularly weird when I find that auxlangs like Sona or Lojban
have jettisoned capitalization.
> I have a kind of English/non-English blend going on when it comes to
> capitalization (eg. kiss the months, days, and nationalities good-bye), but
> like, I find uncapitalized person and place names and starts of sentences
> simply too jarring.
Me too.
On 20 Jun 2013, at 16:15, Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder why nobody chooses to write completely in upper-case letters.
Unifon does, and it works for very short sentences. I'm preparing Alice in
Unifon, and it was impossible. So I've used casing Unifon (devised not by me
but by the originator of the system) which is essentially small-caps.
On 21 Jun 2013, at 12:51, Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I generally write my conlang Angosey in Roman script rather than its native
> scripts. When I do so, I preserve the same capitalization schemes as English
> (my native language) does. I cannot be sure but I suspect this is how most
> (all?) languages that are not written in Roman script are transliterated for
> the benefit of English speakers. If a German speaker writes Korean text in
> Roman script for German readers, does he or she impose a German
> capitalization?
I doubt that a German would capitalize every noun, but sentence-initial
capitalization and capitalization of personal names and other proper nouns
would be done.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.5. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" ever...@evertype.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 7:52 am ((PDT))
On 18 Jun 2013, at 05:58, Sasha Fleischman <zyx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For my proto-language that I'm working on, I initially didn't do
> capitalization because my romanization is essentially IPA, and there's no
> capital ɦ.
Yes, there is, U+A7AA LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH HOOK, êª.
> Since I started working on the language, I've gotten rid of that phoneme, but
> the lack of capitals has stuck.
Most IPA letters have capitals, actually.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.6. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 8:13 am ((PDT))
> From: Michael Everson <ever...@evertype.com>
>
> On 17 Jun 2013, at 02:58, Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> What counts as "traditional" capitalisation? English? German? French?
>> Mandarin?
>
> Putting capital letters at the beginnings of sentences and at the beginnings
> of
> personal names. Sometimes other entities (like week-day or month names) are
> also
> capitalized.
Q.E.D.
> On 17 Jun 2013, at 20:40, DM <decadent.muf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I also tend to find the use of capitals to be aesthetically displeasing,
>
> What does that actually mean? You've lived with them in the Latin script all
> your life.
True, but just because one is exposed to something all one's life doesn't mean
one must
find it aesthetically pleasing! Aesthetically speaking, I might use upper case
for the start of
paragraphs or sections only, and all else would be lower case.
>> I have a kind of English/non-English blend going on when it comes to
>> capitalization (eg. kiss the months, days, and nationalities good-bye), but
>> like, I find uncapitalized person and place names and starts of sentences
>> simply
>> too jarring.
>
> Me too.
At the opposite end, I often increase the range of places that get capitalised:
Earth and
Moon for example, which often go uncapitalised. I tend not to capitalise
nationalities
when prefixed in any way: "unamerican", "antisemitic", etc. I don't like
word-medial
capitalisation, or even capitalisation after a dash. I also capitalise for
emphasis.
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Padraic
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.7. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 8:17 am ((PDT))
On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 13:35:56 -0700
Daniel Myers <d...@dmmyers.com> wrote:
>
> IIRC, the decision to go with all uppercase in computers stemmed from
> the design of the old Telex machines. They only had enough characters
> for either all lower or all upper, and even though studies showed that
> all lower case was easier to read, the CEO opted for upper case on the
> grounds that one must always capitalize the word "God".
A nice story, but the use of upper case goes back to Gauss and Weber in
the 1830s. ASCII was upper case to start with (1963), so EBCDIC was
the first computer code with lower case (1964).
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.8. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 8:31 am ((PDT))
On 21/06/2013 15:30, Michael Everson wrote:
> On 17 Jun 2013, at 01:27, Larry Sulky
> <larrysu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> All my conlangs -- Konya, Lume, Elomi, and Qakwan, use
>> capitalisation only on proper names.
>
> And why wouldn't you help your readers navigate a
> paragraph by beginning sentences with capital letters?
>
When I learnt Classical Greek very many moons ago (How many
moons in 69 and a bit years?) I discovered this convention.
I do not ever recall finding the lack of capital latter at
the beginning of a sentence to be a hindrance in reading.
On the other hand, knowing that if I met a capital I had a
proper name was a great help - for a start, it saved
rummaging through the dictionary.
I have read Latin texts printed with the same conventions
and never found a problem.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language
began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.9. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 9:59 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 08:12:45AM -0700, Padraic Brown wrote:
> > From: Michael Everson <ever...@evertype.com>
[...]
> > On 17 Jun 2013, at 20:40, DM <decadent.muf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I also tend to find the use of capitals to be aesthetically
> >> displeasing,
> >
> > What does that actually mean? You've lived with them in the Latin
> > script all your life.
>
> True, but just because one is exposed to something all one's life
> doesn't mean one must find it aesthetically pleasing! Aesthetically
> speaking, I might use upper case for the start of paragraphs or
> sections only, and all else would be lower case.
I rather like Ebisédian's convention of what amounts to capitalizing the
_end_ of sentences, an influence which I plan to adopt in Tatari Faran,
which is also big in the department of marking the end rather than the
beginning.
[...]
> At the opposite end, I often increase the range of places that get
> capitalised: Earth and Moon for example, which often go uncapitalised.
> I tend not to capitalise nationalities when prefixed in any way:
> "unamerican", "antisemitic", etc. I don't like word-medial
> capitalisation, or even capitalisation after a dash.
I don't like word-medial capitalisation either, but I have to suffer
through it every day in my career: modern-day programming convention is
all about being camelCased, which I find veryUglyAndTotallyJarring, and
for which I totallyPlace allOfTheBlame on Java. :-P
Sigh.
How I wish that those *ahem* caffeine people would have standardized on
underscore_separated_words instead of camelCasing!
> I also capitalise for emphasis.
[...]
Really? I thought you usually áccented for èmphasis.
T
--
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes." -- E.W. Dijkstra
Messages in this topic (40)
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2a. Emphatic "even" in nat and conlangs.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" leolucas1...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 9:06 am ((PDT))
How do you express the concept of emphatic "even" in your conlangs? Do
you use any natlangs as inspiration?
Ecce some examples of the kind of usage I mean:
"I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou [...]"
http://biblehub.com/isaiah/51-12.htm
"I was strong before; but now I am even stronger."
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/even
Até mais!
Leonardo
Messages in this topic (3)
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2b. Re: Emphatic "even" in nat and conlangs.
Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" danny.c.bow...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 9:16 am ((PDT))
I believe that your two usages are slightly different. I read the quote
from Isaiah as saying: I am the *only *one who comforts you.
I read the second example as: I was strong before. Now, I am stronger than
I was before.
My conlang Angosey would probably treat the first one as an adverb - one
that marks the verb "comfort" as only occurring in this specific instance.
More or less: the ONLY time you are comforted is when I comfort you.
The second would be a comparative, roughly:
I am stronger than the time before when I was already strong.
2013/6/21 Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
> How do you express the concept of emphatic "even" in your conlangs? Do
> you use any natlangs as inspiration?
>
> Ecce some examples of the kind of usage I mean:
>
> "I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou [...]"
> http://biblehub.com/isaiah/51-12.htm
>
> "I was strong before; but now I am even stronger."
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/even
>
> Até mais!
>
> Leonardo
>
Messages in this topic (3)
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2c. Re: Emphatic "even" in nat and conlangs.
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 10:01 am ((PDT))
Kash has _kami_ in that sense. In compd. with pun 'if' (> kambun) it means
'although'.
--- On Fri, 6/21/13, Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com> wrote:
How do you express the concept of emphatic "even" in your conlangs? Do
you use any natlangs as inspiration?
Ecce some examples of the kind of usage I mean:
"I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou [...]"
http://biblehub.com/isaiah/51-12.htm
RM Not sure it would be used in this case; more likely some other structure, or
perhaps a cleft sentence with _na ya_ --
"mam na ya, mandu na ya, te ma/rum/apik... lit. "it is I, I myself, I comfort
you..."
I (na ya), myself (na ya) you I/CAUS/comfort...
"I was strong before; but now I am even stronger."
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/even
RM lunda mapeçaka, mo tanju lavi mapecaka kami aloni
lunda ma/pe/çaka, mo tanju lavi ma/pe/çaka kami alo/ni
once/formerly I/have/strength but now more I/have/strength even than/it~that
kambun ripa, lalu/ni ya/yuka-yukar
even.if (it)rains party-the 3s/happen
depending on context, could mean "although it was raining, the party took
place' or "even if it's raining (~might rain), the party will take place"--
could be clarified by using tensed forms or adverbs.
Leonardo
Messages in this topic (3)
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3a. Re: Language and aging
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" leolucas1...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 9:23 am ((PDT))
In my personal experience, I usually count half years when I'm
considered too young for the profession I have. When I was one of the
oldest teachers in a school I worked (I was 28 and most of them were
between 20 and 26), I preferred to ignore the months passed, but now
I'm a 32 and a half university professor and most of my colleagues are
much older than I.
Até mais!
Leonardo
2013/6/20 Jim T <clanrubyl...@yahoo.com>:
> I received this from a friend (in pps form) and thought I would share to the
> list as it brought up interesting ways of looking at age in the English
> language.
>
> Do you realise that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is
> when we're kids?
> If you're less than 10 years old, you're so excited about ageing that you
> think in fractions.
> 'How old are you?' 'I'm four and a half!' You're never thirty-six and a half.
> You're four and a half, going on five!
> You get into your teens; you jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.
> 'How old are you?'
> 'I'm gonna be 16!' You could be 13,
> but hey, you're gonna be 16!
> And then the greatest day of your life ...... .
> You become 21.
> Even the words sound like a ceremony.
> YOU BECOME 21... YESSSS!!!
> But then you turn 30. Oooohh,
> what happened there?
> Makes you sound like bad milk!
> You BECOME 21, you TURN 30,
> then you're PUSHING 40....
> Before you know it, you REACH 50 and your dreams are gone
> But wait!!!
> You MAKE it to 60.
> So you BECOME 21,
> TURN 30, PUSH 40, REACH 50
> and MAKE it to 60.
> You've built up so much speed that you HIT 70!
> After that it's a day-by-day thing;
> you HIT Thursday, June 20, 2013!
> You get into your 80's and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you
> TURN 4:30 ; you REACH bedtime.
> And it doesn't end there Into the 90s, you start going backwards;
> 'I Was JUST 92.'
> Then a strange thing happens.
> If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. 'I'm 100 and a half!'
Messages in this topic (3)
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4a. Re: Spanish s as h
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" j_mach_w...@shared-files.de
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 9:53 am ((PDT))
On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 22:06:52 -0300, Njenfalgar wrote:
>Outside of Spain I think the lenition of the syllable-final /s/ is quite
>common. All Latin Americans I can remember having spoken with did it at
>least in not-all-to-careful speech. Some would delete the /s/ entirely,
>leaving Murcian-style extra vowels (the Cuban I was in the office with for
>a while pronounced /e/ and /o/ as [E] and [O] in checked syllables, leaving
>a height difference behind whenever underlying /s/ disappeared).
>From what I have learnt, the Latin American regions syllable-final [s]
lenition or elision are not necessarily contiguous. There is a broad
tendency for mountain regions to keep the [s] and for coastal regions to
drop it, though I darkly remember that this was a contentious issue without
any consensus on the possible reasons (substrates, waves of immigration,
openness to transportation, climate). One theory is that all of Latin
America used to have an archaic Southern Spain Spanish, but then, a more
Northern and more modern Spanish spread from the colonial centers (after the
Spanish court had firmly established itself in Madrid), while remote areas
conserved the original speech with typical features such as voseo*, merger
of syllable-final [r] and [l], or elision of syllable-final [s].
* Voseo is the name for using the ancient honorific "vos". Nowadays, it is
best known from Argentina, which used to be a very remote area until the
19th century, having been colonized from Peru (and not from the sea).
--
grüess
mach
Messages in this topic (11)
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5a. Re: Equivalent to Grand Master Plans in Proper Linguistics?
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 10:06 am ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Thursday 20 June 2013 15:51:05 I wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
> [...]
> Yes. These are the main reasons why I don't use sound change
> appliers. Working out how the words evolve in a diachronic
> conlang is a creative task, even if you have a sound change
> list at hand, and that is something computers just cannot do.
> Sound change appliers just churn out bogolangs!
>
> I *do* have sound change lists (I prefer not to call them
> "grand master plans", though) for my Hesperic conlangs, but
> I prefer going through those sound changes manually, and when
> the result doesn't make sense, I fix it creatively.
>
> Historical linguistics has advanced *a long way* beyond the
> Neogrammatical paradigm. Irregularities are smoothed out by
> analogy; words are borrowed back and forth between dialects;
> homophonies and other awkwardnesses falling out from the
> regular sound changes are fixed; etc. Considering all this
> stuff is what distinguishes the good and creative diachronic
> conlanger from the novice who just feeds words into an SCA.
Also, there are so many other things that can change in a
language - morphology, syntax, semantics. You miss all of
these when you just feed words in an SCA loaded with a GMP.
In one of my Hesperic languages, a locative marker has become
an inanimate plural suffix from an expression of the type
N LOC Num (N=noun, Num=numeral), meaning 'Num of N', which was
later generalized to plural nouns without numerals. In the
same language, the cognate of Old Albic _alba_ 'Elf' has
acquired the meaning 'ancestor'. Etc. These and other
interesting changes get missed in automated bogolanging.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (14)
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