------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$4.98 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Q7_YsB/neXJAA/yQLSAA/GSaulB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
There are 17 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: vowels: are they necessary?
From: Daniel Asserbo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Conlanging with Dick and Jane
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Germanic links
From: azathoth500 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Babel Text in Xinkutlan
From: J Y S Czhang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Fwd: Conlanging with Dick and Jane
From: caeruleancentaur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Fwd: Conlanging with Dick and Jane
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: German style orthography
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: conlang names
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: Coastlines
From: Andy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: Reading old Greek (was: kudos (was: most looked-up words))
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: Of Angles and Saxons
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: USAGE: Speak-Say-Tell
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
From: Rene Uittenbogaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. OT: FW: Notice of Revocation of Independence
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:53:24 +0100
From: Daniel Asserbo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: vowels: are they necessary?
On 11.12.2004, at 01:40, Stephen Mulraney wrote:
> Carlos Alberto Martinez wrote:
>
>>
>> I thought I've read somewhere, that czech for "cross" is "krst", this
>> qualifies
>> as a vowelless word methinks.
>
> The _r_ is the vowel (like in the second syllable of English _better_,
> although the
> Czech _r_ is trilled IIRC) (yes, syllabic and trilled.. :).
A Czech example sentence with only vocalic _r_:
"Strc prst skrs krk" which means (IIRC): "Stick your finger into your
throat".
They also have vocalic _l_: "vlk" ("wolf").
Cognates from Czech usually have more vowels, e.g. the German name
"Wildschek" which indeed comes from "vlcek" which is a diminutive of
"vlk".
Greetings,
Dan.As.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:24:20 -0800
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Conlanging with Dick and Jane
On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 09:35:36AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Hidy ho.
san tse.
[...]
> Returning after an absence of 6 or 8 months from
> conlanging, I naturally I looked back at my several
> unfinished conlang projects to decide where to pick up
> the pieces. Of course the only sane solution is to
> scrap everything and start all over from scratch. But
> I hated to do that knowing that I'm going to make the
> same mistakes and end up with yet another incomplete
> and uncompletable conlang fragment. That's when
> inspiration hit and a possible solution to systematic
> conlang discovery occurred to me.
[...]
> The solution occurred to me when I was sorting through
> some boxes of old books and came across a handful of
> children's early readers. Suppose one took a first
> year reader like "Fun With Dick and Jane" or
> "McGuffey's Eclectic Reader" and began on page one
> with "See Spot run." and "The cat sees the mouse." and
> translated the entire book, sentence by sentence, into
> the new conlang, discovering vocabulary and
> grammatical principles as they were needed.
I've thought about this before. In fact, now that I have laid down the
basic principles of Tatari Faran, I'd probably do well to pick up an
early reader like this and start translating them.
[...]
> And finally, by working with the conlang beginning at
> such an elementary level it is likely that one
> by-product would be for the designer to develop actual
> fluency in the conlang as the work progressed.
[...]
Yep, I always strive to be at least semi-fluent in my conlangs.
Unfortunately, Tatari Faran is growing so fast I'm having trouble
keeping up. This is where I think doing translations from children's
readers would help a lot.
The other idea I have, which I've already started on, is to go through
the Tatari Faran lexicon from beginning to end, and make a sentence
containing each word/phrase. (Yes, people have already told me I was
nuts.) When I started, the lexicon was about 400 entries or so, but
now it's a whopping 494 entries. But regardless, my approach is to
just move forward (so new words added to parts of the lexicon that
I've already passed won't be included in this run). Currently I'm at
_husu_, "to surge", "to flow", roughly 1/3 of the way through.
I've found that having to construct sentences this way forces me to
experiment with different types of sentences. E.g., you can only do so
many "I see X", "he sees Y", "she sees Z" sentences before you get
utterly bored, so you've to find more interesting things to say. This
causes you to explore parts of the grammar which you may perhaps have
never really given much thought to before.
For example, it was during this exercise that I realized that the
then-current way of forming statements of equivalence doesn't work in
practice. So I had to revise TF grammar to handle these cases more
smoothly. I've also found that I've completely forgotten to consider
question formation with non-verbal sentences (e.g. "is that house
red?", "is she the woman from the village?") in TF grammar. So now
I've filled up the gap. Another large gap was in how idiomatic set
phrases would be used in complex constructions (e.g., "go to rest now,
for it is night" - "it is night" is a special set phrase in TF that
didn't quite fit into the "A because B" paradigm before). Another
thing I'm finding is that temporal phrases may need another revision.
So even though this exercise may be completely crazy (who in their
right mind would make a sentence each for every word in the
dictionary? [1]), it has helped me improve TF a lot. Something to
consider. :-)
[1] The answer, of course, being left-handed people. ;-) Specifically,
left-handed conlangers. :-P
T
--
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:40:32 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
*shrugs* I was always unsure about fortis vs lenis. I've been told I
think that Dutch distinguishes fortis vs lenis rather than voiced vs
voiceless.... I could be wrong though. I've even heard some people argue
that voicing isn't the primary distinction in English (I can't remember
what they were arguing was the primary distinction...), but I wasn't
convinced that they weren't just being difficult. Do the other germanic
languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does? Another thing
I've often wondered: english has unvoiced aspirated stops. Often you
hear about languages that have an unvoiced vs voiced vs aspirate three
way distinction in stops. Can you find voiced aspirated stops? And if
you can, is there any language with a four way distinction unvoiced
unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced
aspirated? Although a voiced aspirated stop would probably easily
migrate to a voiced fricative..... "softening" of voiced stops as in
Spanish seems pretty common in languages anyway, and aspiration tends to
make consonants even "softer" to my ears.
>>It seems really strange to me that s is always voiced at the start of
>>words... how did this arise? I could understand it if (since I'm
>>assuming that originally german had no contrast between [s] and [z]) s
>>was always [z] intervocally, but.. I don't know, I'd just really like to
>>know how it became voiced at the start of all native german words.
>>
>>
>
>It's not like this in all varieties of standard German. Southern standard
>German has no voiced fricatives (except for /v/, which might as well be
>considered an approximant /v\/) and not voiced stops at all. The southern
>German opposition between /s/ and /z/ (e.g. in words such as _reissen_
>/'[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ "to rip" vs. _reisen_ /'[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ "to travel")
>is often described as
>an opposition of fortis vs. lenis, though I've always had the impression
>that it'd be an opposition of long consonant vs. short consonant.
>
>I imagine that High German (that is, southern German) formerly had an
>opposition of short and long consonants, such as is still reflected in the
>orthography and preserved in certain varieties, e.g. many Swiss dialects. I
>also imagine there might have been an interrelation of only having voiceless
>fricatives/stops and of distinguishing short and long consonants. I don't
>know it for sure.
>
>I also imagine, again without any source, that the voiced stops/fricatives
>were always present in Low German. Maybe their occurrence in the actual
>"standard" pronunciation is due to a Low German substratum? For sure, the
>actual prescriptive standard pronunciation is the pronunciation of the
>educated upper class of northern German cities.
>
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
>j. 'mach' wust
>
>
>
>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 13:53:27 -0500
From: azathoth500 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Germanic links
This is interesting, especially the Gothic stuff. It's too bad it's
the only east germanic language we have texts of.
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 01:42:09 -0500, Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Very interesting selection, perhaps of some use to germaniconlangers, if
> they don't already know it:
>
> http://www.oe.eclipse.co.uk/nom/linkspage.htm
>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 5
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 13:53:51 -0500
From: J Y S Czhang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Babel Text in Xinkutlan
In a message dated 12/11/2004 12:16:41 PM Eastern Standard Time, "H. S. Teoh"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 06:40:10PM +0200, Steg Belsky wrote:
>> On Dec 10, 2004, at 9:08 PM, J Y S Czhang wrote:
>> >wowza, man.
>> >or as they say in Terapang (futuristic pidgin Pan-English): ouza, mon.
>
>Hanuman tse! sii ipai tse sa mubun nara? :-)
Bin biz. Bizi merz diip, la.
"Homeless" ... baat, skop a _dom_ inna Palo Alto, CA. Gud, la?
>> hey!
>> how do they say "welcome back" in Terapang? ;)
>[...]
>
>I wanna know too. :-)
Rii elcum. {Re-welcome ;)
>Life would be easier if I had the source code. -- YHL
Mai-bi e-z-bi liev mi hava rut coed.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 6
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 14:26:30 -0500
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:40:32 +0000, Chris Bates
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>*shrugs* I was always unsure about fortis vs lenis. I've been told I
>think that Dutch distinguishes fortis vs lenis rather than voiced vs
>voiceless.... I could be wrong though. I've even heard some people argue
>that voicing isn't the primary distinction in English (I can't remember
>what they were arguing was the primary distinction...), but I wasn't
>convinced that they weren't just being difficult. Do the other germanic
>languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does?
Most of them do, I think. Swiss German dialects, e.g., don't (though there
are clusters of fortis + /h/).
>Another thing
>I've often wondered: english has unvoiced aspirated stops. Often you
>hear about languages that have an unvoiced vs voiced vs aspirate three
>way distinction in stops.
Ancient Greek, e.g.
>Can you find voiced aspirated stops? And if
>you can, is there any language with a four way distinction unvoiced
>unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced
>aspirated?
Sanskrit, e.g., and I suppose that this distinction is also found in modern
Indian languages. Phonetically, the "voiced aspirated" stops are "breathy
voiced". I remember I've read as an explanation that there's not a real
aspiration, but that the following vowel starts voiceless. However, I don't
understand how this is really different from an aspiration.
>Although a voiced aspirated stop would probably easily
>migrate to a voiced fricative..... "softening" of voiced stops as in
>Spanish seems pretty common in languages anyway, and aspiration tends to
>make consonants even "softer" to my ears.
I think this depends on the language: While there are languages where these
substitutions are made several times in a few thousend years, others retain
it unchanged.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
j. 'mach' wust
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 7
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 19:31:15 -0000
From: caeruleancentaur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Fwd: Conlanging with Dick and Jane
Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>The solution occurred to me when I was sorting through
>some boxes of old books and came across a handful of
>children's early readers. Suppose one took a first
>year reader like "Fun With Dick and Jane" or
>"McGuffey's Eclectic Reader" and began on page one
>with "See Spot run." and "The cat sees the mouse." and
>translated the entire book, sentence by sentence, into
>the new conlang, discovering vocabulary and
>grammatical principles as they were needed.
I have toyed with the idea of presenting my conlang Senyecan in the
style of a Berlitz language book. I read them all when I was a kid.
Today I only have the one for Russian. They all followed the same
pattern. Chapter One is entitled "What is this?" and the words for
pencil, book, paper, pen, box & key are introduced. Sentences are of
the type: this is a pencil; is this a pencil; no, it not the pencil,
it is the pen; etc. Chapter 2 deals with clothing. Etc. I would
just have to introduce the appropriate Senyecan grammar where
applicable in place of the Russian.
P.S. The book has a copyright of 1951. I'm sure there have been some
developments in Russian in the interim!! :-)>
Charlie
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 8
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 11:40:26 -0800
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Conlanging with Dick and Jane
--- caeruleancentaur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>
> I have toyed with the idea of presenting my conlang
> Senyecan in the
> style of a Berlitz language book. I read them all
> when I was a kid.
<snip>
Neat idea. I remember the Belitz German from when I
was taking German in high school.
Expanding on my primer idea if I can find one that's
out of copyright and has lots of colorfull pictures
(or even nifty old black-and-white illustrations) it
would be neat to scan the pictures onto a web page and
recreate the whole "See Spot run." experience in the
conlang, pictures and all.
It also occurred to me that just as children make
common mistakes when they are learning a language
(Like over-generalizing in "I runned all the way
home.") so might I "make mistakes" in some of the
early reader translations that would have to be
corrected later when the conlang became more
sophisticated. Just a thought.
--gary
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 9
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 20:47:53 +0100
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: German style orthography
J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
>>So, perhaps use eszett initially, and s medially for /z/?
>
>
> That would be possible. I've read that Jacob Grimm (one of the two
> fairy-tale Grimms) proposed to use the long ſ for /z/ and round s for
> /s/,
> though he abandoned this proposition later.
I have seen this convention actually used in an old
Langenscheidt dictionary. They also used Fraktur of course!
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 10
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 20:52:47 +0100
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: conlang names
Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting Shaul Vardi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>
>> which is not related to Ei, another
>>
>>>language spoken in Scandinavia.
>>
>>Finnish
>
>
> "No" is _ei_ in Finnish? That's a bit close to Swedish _ej_ "not" for comfort
More exactly _ei_ is the third person singular of the negative
verb ("is not"). If my SO asks me _haluatko kahvia_ and I don't
want coffe I answer with the first person singular _en_ ("I'm not").
This said many Finns overuse _ej_ compared to _inte_ when speaking
Swedish.
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 11
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 13:52:22 -0600
From: Andy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Coastlines
> H. S. Teoh replied:
>Interesting way of creating maps. :-) I wonder, though, what I should
>do if I already have an approximate idea of what the map should look
>like, but just need to set down the "fuzzy bits"?
If you have access to Photoshop, here's something that might work:
Use the paintbrush tool to draw the general shape of your land mass.
Then use the Spatter filter to create the interesting irregularities
in the coastline.
-andy.
Andrew D. Chaney
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 12
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 21:18:12 +0100
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Reading old Greek (was: kudos (was: most looked-up words))
Ray Brown wrote:
> IME (quite a long one) those that use a reconstructed ancient
> pronunciation actually have it modified, usually quite a bit, to suit
> their L1 habits and certainly use something that would probably be
> unrecognizable to most of the ancients.
That's my not quite so long experience too. I certainly have
experienced that the reconstructed pronunciation of Swedes
and Norwegians differs on some points, and those of Swedes
and Germans are not easily mutually intelligible!
> I think it is important for a proper understanding of ancient metrics etc
> to know the _theory_ of the reconstructionS [plural] for the different
> varieties of Greek - but for practical purposes I use the current Greek
> pronunciation.
Do you as well use Italian pronunciation for Latin?
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 13
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 15:22:53 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Of Angles and Saxons
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 11:27 AM
Subject: OT: Of Angles and Saxons
>I recently ran across the claim that no Anglo-Saxons called themselves
>'Saxons'
> before the Conquest - that is was strictly an exonym - but all considered
> themselves Angles/English. The names of kingdoms and regions containing
> "Sax" -
> Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Middlesex - supposedly all postdate the Conquest,
> and
> were introduced by the Normans (leaving one to wonder what the kings of
> Wessex
> and so on called their kingdoms).
Well exactly.
> I find this more than a little difficult to believe, but couldn't find any
> explicit denial in any book I've got easy access to. Anyone into these
> matters
> feel like commenting?
>
> Andreas
"Explicit denial" is found in OE textual confirmation. What about Wesseaxna
rice in the Chronicles for the year 866? Her feng Aethered Aethelbryhtes
brothur to Wesseaxna rice. "Here Aethered, Athelbryhtes brother, succeeded
to the kingdom of the West Saxons." Or in Saint Oswald: "Tha becom he to
Westseaxan... "then he came to Wessex." Also in the Battle Brunanburh:
Wesseaxe forth / ondlongne daeg eorodcistum / on last legdun lathum
theodum... "The Westsaxons went forth all day long with (their) fine troops
following on the tracks of the enemy peoples" (i.e., the Scandinavians and
the Scots).
Here it is for Eastseaxan, again in the Chronicles (for the year 893): ...in
on Eastseaxe ongean tha scipu; and more famously in the "Battle of Maldon,"
ll. 68-69: Hi thaer Pantan stream mid prasse bestodon / Eastseaxena ord and
se aeschere. "They, the vanguard of the East-Saxons and the army, stood in
battle array at the Pante River."
There are entries, too, for the Suthseaxe, but I'm too hurried to look it
up. Your source is totally mistaken.
Sally
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 14
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 17:07:14 -0500
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: USAGE: Speak-Say-Tell
On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 21:13:04 +0100, Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 11:30:26 -0700, Muke Tever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 12:23:46 -0500, Geoff Horswood
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > What about other natlangs?
>>
>> In Spanish the ordinary words seem to be "hablar" (speak) and "decir"
>> (say, tell).
>
>German also has this two-way division into "sprechen" (speak) and
>"sagen" (say, tell). There's also "erzählen", but that's more "tell"
>in the sense of "recount", as in "tell a story", not so much "tell
>someone that [X happened]".
I had an inclination that the original meaning of English "tell"
was "recount, narrate." Now I'm confirmed by the MSN Dictionary: "Old
English tellan , from a prehistoric Germanic word meaning 'put in order'
(both in narration and counting), which is also the ancestor of English
tale and talk" (http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/tell.html).
There is another primary usage of English "tell" - to issue an instruction
or a command. For example, "I told him to keep that door shut!" Perhaps
the development was like this: recount > remind > command. In the sentence
above, "him" is actually an indirect object.
- Rob
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 15
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 23:49:45 +0100
From: Rene Uittenbogaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
Chris Bates wrote:
> *shrugs* I was always unsure about fortis vs lenis. I've been told I
> think that Dutch distinguishes fortis vs lenis rather than voiced vs
> voiceless....
For the distinctions between /s/ and /z/ [z_0], and /f/ and /v/ [v_0],
this is often true, but this may be subject to individual and/or
regional variation. I don't know if this also occurs for other voiced
consonants.
> I could be wrong though. I've even heard some people argue
> that voicing isn't the primary distinction in English (I can't remember
> what they were arguing was the primary distinction...), but I wasn't
> convinced that they weren't just being difficult.
I learnt the following things from the great book "Accepted American
Pronunciation: A Practical Guide for Speakers of Dutch":
The primary distinction between word-initial stops like "pet" and "bet"
is aspiration. Dutch people, when speaking English, often risk their
(unaspirated) /p/, /t/ and /k/ to be mistaken for /b/, /d/ and /g/.
An important (the primary?) distinction between word-final stops like
"bet" and "bed" is the vowel length. For "free" vowels the difference is
even greater (as in "feet" and "feed").
> Do the other germanic
> languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does?
Dutch doesn't. Just unaspirated stops.
Éylo
René
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 16
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 23:57:23 +0100
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: fortis vs lenis (was Re: German style orthography)
Quoting Rene Uittenbogaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > Do the other germanic
> > languages also aspirate unvoiced stops like English does?
>
> Dutch doesn't. Just unaspirated stops.
As I understand it, Dutch (and Afrikaans?) is the exception proving the rule in
this case, at least as standard languages are concerned.
Andreas
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 17
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 19:02:11 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: OT: FW: Notice of Revocation of Independence
You may have seen this before . . . but I thought the new law to learn
to distinguish British from Australian accents was apropos. :)
----- Forwarded message -----
NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE TO CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA
In light of your failure to make the correct decision in electing your
President, thus showing you to be unfit to govern yourselves, we hereby
give you notice of the revocation of your independence effective as of
Monday 8th November 2004.
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties
over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which
she doesn't much fancy.
Your new Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. Tony Blair M.P., for the 97.85% of
you unaware of the outside world) will appoint a Minister for America
without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be
disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated in twelve months' time to
determine if any of you noticed.
To aid your transition into a British Crown Dependency, the following
rules are introduced with immediate effect:
1. All citizens are to look up "revocation" in the Oxford English
Dictionary. While there, check the pronunciation guide for "aluminium" -
this may be surprising for you. Generally attempt to raise your
vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Using the same 27
words interspersed with "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable form of
communication. Look up "interspersed".
2. There is no such thing as "U.S. English". We will let Microsoft know
on your behalf.
3. Learn to distinguish British and Australian accents. It's not
difficult.
4. Hollywood will henceforth be required to occasionally cast Englishmen
as good guys.
5. Re-learn your original anthem, "God Save the Queen". Please ensure
that you have complied with the first law before attempting this.
6. Stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of
"football". What you refer to as "football" is not a very good game. The
2.15% of you aware of a world outside of your borders may have noticed
that no one else plays it. Play proper football instead; to start with
get the girls to help you - it is a difficult game. Those of you brave
enough will, eventually, be allowed to play rugby, which is similar to
American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every
twenty seconds or wearing full Kevlar body armour like nancies.
7. Declare war on Quebec and France, using nukes if they give you any
merde. The 97.85% of you unaware of the outside world should count
yourselves lucky - the Russians have never really been bad guys. "Merde"
is French for "sh*t".
8. 4th July is no longer a public holiday. 2nd November will be the new
national holiday.
9. American cars are hereby banned. They are crap; it's for your own
good. When we show you German cars, you'll understand.
10. Please tell us who killed JFK. Its been driving us crazy.
----- End forwarded message -----
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
