There are 4 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. describing sounds
From: Adam Walker
1b. Re: describing sounds
From: Ben Scerri
2a. Re: Natural World Taxonomies
From: Alex Fink
3a. Re: I crave a dictionary!
From: Scott Hlad
Messages
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1a. describing sounds
Posted by: "Adam Walker" [email protected]
Date: Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:04 pm ((PST))
I happened upon this jewel in a set of on-line lessons for Kabardian today.
The Vowel Ù has not the analogy in English. It is close to 'ee' ('beep')
but more locked and has not the articulations in the manner of sprained
lips.
I couldn't help sharing.
Adam who is still laughing even though his lips are sprained
Messages in this topic (2)
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1b. Re: describing sounds
Posted by: "Ben Scerri" [email protected]
Date: Thu Dec 29, 2011 10:36 pm ((PST))
...I can't even imagine how one would strain their lips...
Thanks for the hilarious share :)
2011/12/30 Adam Walker <[email protected]>
> I happened upon this jewel in a set of on-line lessons for Kabardian today.
>
>
> The Vowel Ñ has not the analogy in English. It is close to 'ee' ('beep')
> but more locked and has not the articulations in the manner of sprained
> lips.
>
>
>
> I couldn't help sharing.
>
>
>
> Adam who is still laughing even though his lips are sprained
>
Messages in this topic (2)
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2a. Re: Natural World Taxonomies
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Thu Dec 29, 2011 5:42 pm ((PST))
On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:58:28 +0000, Sam Stutter <[email protected]> wrote:
>Since relocating my conculture, I've been going about cataloguing the sorts
of wildlife my Ny`spe`ke speakers will come across. What I'm finding
difficult is, what level of species detail would a language go into?
[...]
>What I wanted to know was, when it comes to inedible plants, small rodents,
birds, fish, deer, etc, how does one go about deciding whether a species is
individual or part of a group? And if it is part of a group, how does one go
about deciding what the boundaries of this group is?
Well, that's already the second question. The first is which critters even
get a name at all, or only get a patchwork of extremely local names with no
consistencies (that might not be a concern if the Ny`spe`ke-phone territory
is small tho). Wikipedia, for instance, says
| In a book that lists over 1200 species of fishes[9] more than half have
| no widely recognised common name; they either are too nondescript or too
| rarely seen to have earned any widely accepted common name.
(The book is Heemstra, Phillip C.; Smith, Margaret (1999). Smith's Sea
Fishes. Southern Book Publishers. ISBN 1-86812-032-5.)
I once read a description of the birds reconstructable for IE, I think,
which pointed out that aside from those explainable on grounds of utility or
bignitude, we see ones which have distinctive onomatopoeic names: the owl is
*ul- or something, the hoopoe is *h1epop-. So that might be another
criterion.
Actually, that was probably in Adams and Mallory. Conveniently it's the
chapter on fauna that Oxford University Press have made available as a
sample. Another data point, at the least:
http://www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-928791-0.pdf
Also, keep in mind (as you likely know) that names that refer to groups of
species have no reason to refer only to clades; clades are neither
necessarily visible nor relevant. There are reasonably well known large
examples ("fish" are not a clade), but plenty of small ones among plants &c
as well (e.g. Syrian rue is not a rue).
[I halfwise say this because it seems to have been missed on some sides of
the recent heated discussion about conlang genealogy. "Indo-European" is,
definitionally, a clade. Esperanto is not IE; it belongs to no language
family aside from the Esperantic languages, not even fictionally (like
Talossan but unlike Brithenig). But it is a member of Standard Average
European and several other sprachbunds and areal groupings and whatnot
besides, including lexically-defined ones. And from the synchronic
perspective, surely thàt is the important thing.]
Alex
Messages in this topic (3)
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3a. Re: I crave a dictionary!
Posted by: "Scott Hlad" [email protected]
Date: Thu Dec 29, 2011 9:35 pm ((PST))
I generally have the grammar in a Word document. For the dictionary, I create a
custom Access database. I also have some secondary helps usually done in Excel
which show some example tables: conjugations, declensions, word endings etc. I
spend a lot of time at work writing access databases with custom VB in the back
ground.
Scotto
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of BPJ
Sent: December 29, 2011 4:45 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: I crave a dictionary!
On 2011-12-29 23:33, Sam Stutter wrote:
> I find having two documents*is* the most optimal. I have the grammar (in
> Pages, but actually printed out as it doesn't change too often) and then a
> dictionary in Numbers. Because your language conjugates with suffixes
> (regularly?) a grammar and a dictionary makes sense: the dictionary requires
> fewer entries and so is easier to search.
I have something similar: a spreadsheet document for
the vocabulary (OpenOffice here, and always backed up
to a plain CSV file at the end of a session), and the
grammar in one or more textfiles (more if any part of
the grammar is at all complicated) which I at need
convert to HTML/ODT/LaTeX with pandoc -- although that
was a while ago now. I also keep writing in theory more
and more sophisticated Perl programs for converting the
CSV vocabulary into something presentable.
/bpj
Messages in this topic (7)
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