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There are 17 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Celtic languages?
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Novel ConGrammar
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Grammar sketchlang - improving?
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Celtic languages?
From: Elliott Lash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Contemporaneous protolanguages
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Effect on number agreement when new numbers arise
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: "I'm after ..." (Re: Maybe Spam? "Sorunsuz Yathamanın Kefyi .. .")
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: "I'm after ..." (Re: Maybe Spam? "Sorunsuz Yathamanın Kefyi .. .")
From: John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Vulcan?
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: Basque Gender Marking (was Re: Further language development Q's)
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: "I'm after ..." (Re: Maybe Spam? "Sorunsuz Yathamanın Kefyi .. .")
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Celtic languages?
From: Muke Tever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
From: Glenn Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
From: Glenn Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: Celtic languages?
From: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:04:26 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Celtic languages?
Quoting Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Monday, September 27, 2004, at 07:52 , Joe wrote:
>
> > Ray Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> >> I need to be convinced that the P ~ Q split occurred before the Gaelic
> >> and
> >> Brittonic languages developed. There is also a similar P ~ Q split among
> >> the Italic languages: for example Latin belonged to Q langs, Sabine
> >> belonged to the P group. Those who posit a Celto-Italic family sometimes
> >> put the Q ~ P split even earlier than Jo. But I see no need to do this.
> >> Similar divisions occurred in the ancient Greek dialects and AFAIK no one
> >> has suggested linking the division there either to the P ~ Q split in the
> >> 'Celtic' langs or in the Italic langs.
> >>
> >
> > There's no actual evidence, but I find it makes things easier for me.
>
> Right - so basically simplification of classification.
>
> If all the languages are related, the Q versions surely represents the
> oldest forms; P is an innovation. It could well be that Brittonic &
> Gaulish changed to P, and that proto-Irish remained Q, and other
> continental forms also remained Q. But without far more evidence than we
> have, I fail to see how we can certain.
Sounds rather "satemic" to me - the central members switch *q>*p, the outlayers
retain *q.
I was once taught (well, I read in a textbook) that shared innovations, never
shared retensions, make genetic groups. Labels such as Q-Celtic or Q-Italic
would thus be meaningless (which is not to say that the groups so called might
not be valid genetic groupings due to shared innovations in other areas).
[snip]
> On Monday, September 27, 2004, at 09:50 , Rodlox wrote:
>
> >> Galatian - are there any inscriptions? It seems that around 280 BCE a
> >> group of Galatai made their way from the Balkans into Asia Minor.
> >
> > I'd once heard that they came from France, originally.
>
> I wasn't aware the Galatai were ever in Gaul/France. I thought all the
> ancient references referred to the Balkans & Asia Minor. What evidence do
> we have of a group moving across Europe from France before settling in
> Asia Minor?
FWIW, my encyclopaedia says that the Balkanic and Minor Asiatic Celts probably
consisted of a warrior elite of Western or Central European extraction ruling
over peoples speaking non-Celtic languages. It doesn't say anything about
whether these aristocrats retained a Celtic language for any considerable
length of time.
Is Gaulish, BTW, a monolithic entity? Its range seems very large for an Ancient
language spoken by a settled population without a central political authority -
cf the umpteen languages of Italy before Latin took over.
Livius.org claims that Celtic languages were spoken on the east bank of the
Rhine well into the Christian Era. No details beyond that they used clusters,
such as /gb/, ill tolerated by Latin phonology.
Andreas
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:12:51 +0100
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Novel ConGrammar
The Romance languages of course use an indicative future tense in some
situations, and in other (more) uncertain conditions use a subjunctive
tense (either subjunctive present or subjunctive future if any romance
language still has a future subjunctive). Would the distinction be
similar? Although the difference between the use of the indicative
future and subjunctive does not seem to be a matter of definite versus
indefinite future time:
iré
ir-é
go-fut.1st.sing
I will go (in the future... time not necessarily specified)
Vete antes de que llegue Juan
Ve-te antes de que lleg-e Juan
go.imp-you.familiar before of that arrive-3rd.pres.subj Juan
Go before Juan arrives (in future but uncertain... Juan might never arrive)
I know the second example at least isn't perfect... but my brain
suddenly emptied lol and my Spanish is rusty. I wouldn't even attempt to
give an example in French, because it'd be truly awful.
>Quoting Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>
>
>
>>> indefinate future (farther than one can think)
>>> definate future (fore-sight & planning)
>>>
>>>
>>I fail to see how the future can ever be definite. Foresight & planning
>>can do much to increase the likelihood of a situation - but it can never
>>be definite.
>>
>>
>
>Sounds like the tense for oracular utterances. Or for performatives relating to
>the future ("hereby I declare that you will be Mayor of Junkville from the 23rd
>of October!").
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:30:47 +0200
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Grammar sketchlang - improving?
> >Wordlist:
> > | word | word-as-noun | word-as-verb
> >landslide | aka-ebe | akayebe | akanebe
> >smooth | oa-eb |oayneb | oaneb |{note: when
the
> >word ends in a consonant, insert an |n| following the |y|}.
> >
> > getting better?
>
> Nice.
thank you.
> Couple questions: what does n-tilde stand for?
same sound as in the Spanish - the "ny" in the English "canyon".
> [J]? [N]? What distinguishes
> a word from a word-as-noun or from a word-as-verb? Is it the stem of the
word?
the difference is in the center of the word...analagous to "ran" & "run".
thank you for your comments.
> Ben
>
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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 03:11:52 -0700
From: Elliott Lash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Celtic languages?
--- Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > In the texts we have, we have '-cue' meaning
> 'and'. We also have */p/
> > being lost - 'uer' for Latin 'super'.
>
> The loss of IE /p/ is common to both Q and P
> 'Celts'. If _uer_ is cognate
> with Latin _super_ we also have a loss of /s/.
> That's very slight evidence.
Well, actually, it's probably a case of that so-called
IE phenomena "moveable-s"
The word may have been:
*s-uperi
*uperi
O.E ofer
Sanskrit upari
Celtic uer > maybe: O. Irish for 'on'
Greek hyper (from *super(i))
Latin super
Elliott
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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:07:19 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I believe that there can be no judgement on the
> likeliness of sounds that isn't determined by the languages one speaks.
Perhaps. I would be _highly_ surprised, however, if there is any human who'd
perceive [s_a] and [s_m] as more dissimilar to one another than either to [k].
This of perceived similarity. Certainly the _acoustic_ similarity of two sounds,
vocal or otherwise, can be objectively measured.
Andreas
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Message: 6
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 13:35:45 +0200
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Contemporaneous protolanguages
> On Sep 28, 2004, at 12:23 PM,
wrote:
> >>>> Cole-Syria (that spit of land linking Egypt to Arabia & Palestine)
> >>>> ->
> >>>> Mediterranean (sailboat or at least a raft) ->
> >>>> home of the Sumerians.
> >>>> would that work?
>
> >>> Coele-Syria, if i remember correctly, *is*
> >>> Palestine/Israel/Canaan/etc., as well as Lebanon (i.e. pretty much
> >>> the
> >>> whole Levant area). It's a Greek name meaning something like "Hollow
> >>> Syria", referring to the northern non-oceanic part of the
> >>> African-Asian
> >>> Rift.
> >>> The spit of land you're thinking of is probably the Sinai peninsula.
>
> >> my Egyptology teacher said that that was Cole-Syria...at least
> >> during the time of Ramses.
>
> Weird... which Rameses?
Ramses II...I *think*. (mind, it's been a number of years since I took the
course).
> I just read a website that said that both of us are wrong,
what're the odds? :)
> and
> Coele-Syria is the Mediterranean coastline north of the Litani river.
>
> >>> The Sumerians lived in what's now Kuwait (at least if any of it
> >>> wasn't underwater at the time) and southern Iraq
> >> umm...then why all the talk of crossing deserts? :) just sail
> >> *around* Arabia.
> >> yes? :)
>
> Hmmm... i dunno, would people back then have been able to do that?
not sure; seems doable, at least on the surface.
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Message: 7
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:26:21 +0100
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Effect on number agreement when new numbers arise
Khangaşyagon verbs are marked for number of the subject (singular/plural).
The plural form is marked with a suffix in the last position, both for
nouns and for verbs. Wagoragon, as I have previously mentioned, has
developed a third number, the multiple, used when the quantity of things
referred to is, at least in principle, known. This is formed by
reduplication. It occurs to me that a new form of the verb should arise to
agree with subjects in the multiple. Any ideas what form it should take?
Pete
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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:01:42 +0100
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "I'm after ..." (Re: Maybe Spam? "Sorunsuz Yathamanın Kefyi .. .")
Joe wrote:
> Keith Gaughan wrote:
>
>> Well, there's one glaring one that shows that I'm from around the
>> border, and that is the use of the tag statement "so X
>> do/am/will/have/would/etc.". You should be more than familar with
>> that one from Father Ted. For shame, and you having lived there too!
>
> Ah, you see, I didn't count that - I use it too.
You might have picked that up while you were living here. Everybody
seems to, and I have to resist the urge to write and say it while I'm
in Cork because people keep on picking up on it and slagging me about
it.
<on my use of 'wee'>
> Yes, I wasn't quite sure whether it was a borrowing from Scottish in a
> semi-jocular fashion or an actual dialectal feature.
Nope, actual dialectical feature, just like using "cat" for "awful" and
"tae" for "tea".
>> [1] Slagging off Leitrim is just short of being a national sport, along
>> with slagging off Dublin, Tipperary, and, in particular, Kerry.
>> Don't ask me why...
>
> Yes, I don't see why. From what I remember, it was rather pretty.
> Empty, perhaps, but pretty.
Ok, I'll explain. That's the point: nobody lives there. The whole county
has about half the population per km of Sligo--16/km vs. 32/km. Kerry
gets slagged because because they're--or so it goes--born idiots, just
like Belgium and Austria get slagged in France and Germany. Tipperary
gets slagged because of the accent. And Dublin gets slagged because it's
full of Jackeens.
--
Keith Gaughan -- talideon.com
The man who removes a mountain begins
by carrying away small stones...
...to make place for some really big nukes!
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 9
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:34:56 -0400
From: John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "I'm after ..." (Re: Maybe Spam? "Sorunsuz Yathamanın Kefyi .. .")
Keith Gaughan scripsit:
> >>Well, there's one glaring one that shows that I'm from around the
> >>border, and that is the use of the tag statement "so X
> >>do/am/will/have/would/etc.". You should be more than familar with
> >>that one from Father Ted. For shame, and you having lived there too!
> >
> >Ah, you see, I didn't count that - I use it too.
>
> You might have picked that up while you were living here. Everybody
> seems to, and I have to resist the urge to write and say it while I'm
> in Cork because people keep on picking up on it and slagging me about
> it.
Hmm. I take it that what's dialectal about this is the tag use?
I have no trouble with:
My mother told me to always brush my teeth, and so I do.
(where "so" = "therefore"), or with
My mother told me if I didn't brush my teeth they'd rot,
so I do.
(where "so" = "consequently"), or even with
A: It would help if you'd give less juvenile examples.
B: So I will!
(where "so"'s force is not clear to me).
But none of these have the characteristic flat (in AmE) intonation
of a tag.
> Nope, actual dialectical feature, just like using "cat" for "awful" and
> "tae" for "tea".
All Ireland said /te/ for "tea" until the end of the 19th century or
even later, which is why it's a feature of Stage Irish; it's probably
reinforced in your area by Ulster Scots, though.
> Ok, I'll explain. That's the point: nobody lives there. The whole county
> has about half the population per km of Sligo--16/km vs. 32/km. Kerry
> gets slagged because because they're--or so it goes--born idiots, just
> like Belgium and Austria get slagged in France and Germany. Tipperary
> gets slagged because of the accent. And Dublin gets slagged because it's
> full of Jackeens.
Huh, you call those explanations? Capital cities are always despised
by the hinterland, and the only reason people don't slag Cork is because
they're afraid to come up against the local penchant for homicidal mania. :-)
--
"Clear? Huh! Why a four-year-old child John Cowan
could understand this report. Run out [EMAIL PROTECTED]
and find me a four-year-old child. I http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
can't make head or tail out of it." http://www.reutershealth.com
--Rufus T. Firefly on government reports
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Message: 10
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:53:04 -0400
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:07:19 +0200, Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>> I believe that there can be no judgement on the
>> likeliness of sounds that isn't determined by the languages one speaks.
>
>Perhaps. I would be _highly_ surprised, however, if there is any human
>who'd perceive [s_a] and [s_m] as more dissimilar to one another than
>either to [k].
Sure. And I was highly surprised when I discovered that Spanish ears would
perceive [j] and [S] as allophones.
>This of perceived similarity. Certainly the _acoustic_ similarity of two
>sounds, vocal or otherwise, can be objectively measured.
I understand that the question is about perception. Of course you can
measure something, but if you want to figure out the most dissimilar
sounds, there's a need for much interpretation.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
j. 'mach' wust
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Message: 11
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:31:16 +0200
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Vulcan?
Does anyone know what Vulcan language was being used in 1st season
'Enterprise'?
was it one of the languages under 'Vulcan' at
http://www.langmaker.com/db/conlangglance.htm ? (ie,
http://home.teleport.com/~vli/vlif.htm ).
just wondering.
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Message: 12
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:38:22 -0500
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Basque Gender Marking (was Re: Further language development Q's)
From: Tamas Racsko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> There is another important factor of choosing examples, that is
> the available knowledge of the individual, in this very case: mine.
> :)) I am much more familiar with Sumerian than with Georgian.
Granted. :)
> However, if sign languages can be treated as languages, I do not
> find it heretic to treat witten Sumerian as a laguage, even if its
> vocal form would be a completely different idiom.
There's a difference though between sign language and the kind of
language reconstructed for Sumerian: the structure of sign languages
is amenable to modern falsification and testing; the structure of
Sumerian is not, pending the discovery and analysis of new texts.
> I do not find it
> a possible theory to state that people in 3000 B.C. would have
> tried to cheat us by inventing an unnatural "conlang", i.e. written
> Sumerian. Therefore, if it would be a conlang, it still would
> reflect real, natural features of early Mesopotamian linguistic
> area that is worth to cite as examples.
The point Thomsen was trying to make in the quote I cited in my
last post was precisely that Sumerian was *not* "written" even
in the same way that, say, Chinese is written. Modern Chinese
uses many logographic and syllabic elements, and actually attempts
to reflect the entire speech stream, so that what few grammatical
elements exist in Chinese (e.g. perfectivizing -le) must be present.
The same cannot be said of Sumerian: especially early on, it was
often the case that *no* grammatical elements were written down,
just (some of the) verbal and nominal roots deemed important to
remember the oral text, since Sumeria was still an *oral* culture.
==========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
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Message: 13
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 14:54:51 +0100
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "I'm after ..." (Re: Maybe Spam? "Sorunsuz Yathamanın Kefyi .. .")
John Cowan wrote:
> Keith Gaughan scripsit:
>
>>>>Well, there's one glaring one that shows that I'm from around the
>>>>border, and that is the use of the tag statement "so X
>>>>do/am/will/have/would/etc.". You should be more than familar with
>>>>that one from Father Ted. For shame, and you having lived there too!
>>>
>>>Ah, you see, I didn't count that - I use it too.
>>
>>You might have picked that up while you were living here. Everybody
>>seems to, and I have to resist the urge to write and say it while I'm
>>in Cork because people keep on picking up on it and slagging me about
>>it.
>
> Hmm. I take it that what's dialectal about this is the tag use?
> I have no trouble with:
>
> My mother told me to always brush my teeth, and so I do.
>
> (where "so" = "therefore"), or with
>
> My mother told me if I didn't brush my teeth they'd rot,
> so I do.
>
> (where "so" = "consequently"), or even with
>
> A: It would help if you'd give less juvenile examples.
> B: So I will!
>
> (where "so"'s force is not clear to me).
>
> But none of these have the characteristic flat (in AmE) intonation
> of a tag.
Nope, that's a valid usage universally in English. The dialectical usage
I'm talking about is used as follows:
1. I'm a software developer, so I am.
2. I'll be off to Micromail to pick up that book, so I will.
3. I've finished upgrading the backend to UDI, so I have.
It's more for emphasis, though it's used a bit to much to have quite
that much force.
>>Nope, actual dialectical feature, just like using "cat" for "awful" and
>>"tae" for "tea".
>
> All Ireland said /te/ for "tea" until the end of the 19th century or
> even later, which is why it's a feature of Stage Irish; it's probably
> reinforced in your area by Ulster Scots, though.
True. But then, Ulster Scots isn't a real language. <ducks> ;-D
But seriously, Ulster Scots isn't spoken anywhere near where I'm from.
It's move of an east NI thing than west.
>> Ok, I'll explain. That's the point: nobody lives there. The whole county
>> has about half the population per km of Sligo--16/km vs. 32/km. Kerry
>> gets slagged because because they're--or so it goes--born idiots, just
>> like Belgium and Austria get slagged in France and Germany. Tipperary
>> gets slagged because of the accent. And Dublin gets slagged because it's
>> full of Jackeens.
>
> Huh, you call those explanations? Capital cities are always despised
> by the hinterland, and the only reason people don't slag Cork is because
> they're afraid to come up against the local penchant for homicidal mania. :-)
That's true. But Dublin gets a particular slagging[1] because of what
happened when Queen Victoria came over to visit[1] the country. Despised
they may be, but I think it's tinged with a bit more ire than is usual.
K.
[1] http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=63909
[2] http://indigo.ie/~kfinlay/General/victoria.htm
[3]
--
Keith Gaughan -- talideon.com
The man who removes a mountain begins
by carrying away small stones...
...to make place for some really big nukes!
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 14
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 07:54:13 -0600
From: Muke Tever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Celtic languages?
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 03:11:52 -0700, Elliott Lash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> --- Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
>> > In the texts we have, we have '-cue' meaning
>> 'and'. We also have */p/
>> > being lost - 'uer' for Latin 'super'.
>>
>> The loss of IE /p/ is common to both Q and P
>> 'Celts'. If _uer_ is cognate
>> with Latin _super_ we also have a loss of /s/.
>> That's very slight evidence.
>
> Well, actually, it's probably a case of that so-called
> IE phenomena "moveable-s"
>
> The word may have been:
> *s-uperi
> *uperi
>
> O.E ofer
> Sanskrit upari
> Celtic uer > maybe: O. Irish for 'on'
> Greek hyper (from *super(i))
> Latin super
Actually Greek |hyper| isn't necessarily from *super, given that all initial y- (save
the name of the letter itself) comes out to hy- in any case, whether there was an *s
or not. Given that Italic is apparently the only one with an *s there (which it also
has in |sub|, which again isn't attested in other families) the Italic s- is probably
an innovation.
*Muke!
--
website: http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/
FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 15
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 01:44:48 +1000
From: Glenn Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:29, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> You have many different fricatives with the tongue tip (th,
> s, sh). I guess that many people would think these sounds are
> more like each other than e.g. /p/ and /b/.
I'm only going by how they sound to me, which is a very non-optimal
way to do things, I know. Suggestions always welcome.
I did have th, s and sh merged for a while. Maybe I'll re-merge them
again. Especially If I can get some other distinct consonants I may
have missed or over-merged elsewhere.
I'm not particularly attached to what I have come up with so far, just
to the idea of very distinctive sounds. I couldn't really care less
what the sounds actually are, so long as I have enough for a
reasonable vocabulary without resorting to tediously long words.
I seem to be working at anti-thesis to speedtalk ;-) But I don't want
to end up speaking in Morse.
> I believe that
> there can be no judgement on the likeliness of sounds that
> isn't determined by the languages one speaks.
I guess the judgement is somewhat based on what you are used to,
though I think the measurable physical distinctiveness of the sounds
would play a strong part too.
As I said, I'm biased by my native tongue. Doesn't mean I like my bias
though ;-)
> It's strange
> that you have a single sign for h and schwa. You have few
> back consonants, only /g/. Me as a German speaking would
> consider the distinction between [x] and [h] to be bigger
> than any distinction of th and s or of s and sh.
I feel I can get away with the h/shwa symbol because a h can never
appear where a shwa would and vice versa (at least in the way I speak
-- I'd be interested in objections). ie: I would never begin a
syllable with a shwa or have a 'h' anywhere but at the start of a
syllable. Doesn't mean they are said the same (though I seem to say
'shwa' the same as the back end of a 'h')
One point of the system is that you can use a broad range of
pronounciations for each letter, centered on the default but drifting
somewhat to the comfort zone relative to surrounding letters (and
according to regional accent).
> So you're concerned about writing speed without ever having
> written? :)
Reading speed. I don't think the use of risers-descenders has much
effect on writing speed, especially since I am more interested in
keeping the alphabet small enough for rapid touch-typing (ie fit on a
3x10 key matrix).
Glenn
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Message: 16
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 01:50:16 +1000
From: Glenn Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: newbie: have alphabet, will conlang
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 20:53, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:07:19 +0200, Andreas Johansson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >This of perceived similarity. Certainly the _acoustic_
> > similarity of two sounds, vocal or otherwise, can be
> > objectively measured.
>
> I understand that the question is about perception. Of course
> you can measure something, but if you want to figure out the
> most dissimilar sounds, there's a need for much
> interpretation.
If perception is based on what one is used to, then I am more
interested in the measurable distinctions, after that I can worry
about getting used to it ;-)
Is there any data about this sort of thing. As an absolute noob, I
don't even know what keywords to run a search on here.
Glenn.
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Message: 17
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:58:17 +0100
From: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Celtic languages?
Ray Brown wrote:
>
>> The Celtiberian language is fairly sparse, it's true, but it
>> also has a few larger texts.
>
>
> Where are they published? What do they show?
>
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/kelt/keltibbs.htm
That's one of them - the biggest known one.
> [snip]
>
>>> much the same. How much _direct_ evidence do we have about the Galatian
>>> language?
>>>
>>
>> I don't believe we have any. Apart from place names, of course.
>
>
> Place names are tricky things - people often take over names from the
> language they displaced. But what are the place names in question?
>
Unknowledgeable entirely. I just heard there are some.
> [snip]
>
>>> I notice you confidently say that Celtibrian is Q-celtic. To day that,
>>> you
>>> must have more information than I have - which is by no means
>>> improbable.
>>> What is your information? This is not meant to be critical - I really
>>> want
>>> to know.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> In the texts we have, we have '-cue' meaning 'and'. We also have */p/
>> being lost - 'uer' for Latin 'super'.
>
>
> The loss of IE /p/ is common to both Q and P 'Celts'. If _uer_ is cognate
> with Latin _super_ we also have a loss of /s/.
> That's very slight evidence.
Well, okay. Those are just a few examples. I'm sure wiser people than
I have done it in more detail. But the thing showing it as Q-celtic was
the '-cue' ending. Gaulish, AFAIK, has '-pe'.
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