There are 13 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Spanish s as h From: H. S. Teoh 1b. Re: Spanish s as h From: John Q 1c. Re: Spanish s as h From: MorphemeAddict 1d. Re: Spanish s as h From: H. S. Teoh 1e. Re: Spanish s as h From: John Q 1f. Re: Spanish s as h From: Jyri Lehtinen 1g. Re: Spanish s as h From: Leonardo Castro 2.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters From: Douglas Koller 2.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters From: H. S. Teoh 2.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters From: Douglas Koller 2.4. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters From: G. van der Vegt 2.5. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters From: Daniel Bowman 3a. Re: What do you call the damn thing! From: Douglas Koller Messages ________________________________________________________________________ 1a. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 6:09 pm ((PDT)) On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 08:46:09PM -0400, John Q wrote: > On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 16:22:13 -0400, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >Where is s spoken as h in Spanish-speaking world? What are the > >conditions for this sound change? > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > You can definitely hear it in Cuban Spanish as well as several pockets > in South America. It occurs wherever /s/ is in syllable-final > position. So the word "estos" is pronounced [eh.toh]. Many speakers > take this further and pronounce it [e:to:]. if you've ever watched > the popular variety program "Sábado Gigante" on Saturday nights on the > Univision channel you'll notice the host Don Francisco has this > accent. The show comes from Chile, although I don't know if that's > where he's from originally. The popular Spanish-lamguage TV host > Cristina Saralegui, who hosted her own show called Cristina for many > years, also speaks this way. She is Cuban. [...] Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides the _s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell if she does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a dialectal occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity? T -- Verbing weirds language. -- Calvin (& Hobbes) Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ 1b. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "John Q" jquijad...@gmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 6:30 pm ((PDT)) On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:07:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote: >Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides the >_s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell if she >does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a dialectal >occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity? > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well, the Spanish word is "espíritu" so the elision of the syllable-final /s/ would follow the general pattern. It would seem that the particular speaker you mention goes on to elide (or perhaps devoice?) the initial vowel as well, given its atonic position before a tonic antepenultimate vowel (which is a somewhat atypical stress pattern for Spanish). --John Q. Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ 1c. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" lytl...@gmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 7:10 pm ((PDT)) Thanks for all the responses. They're a big help. stevo On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 9:30 PM, John Q <jquijad...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:07:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> > wrote: > > >Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides the > >_s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell if she > >does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a dialectal > >occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity? > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Well, the Spanish word is "espíritu" so the elision of the syllable-final > /s/ would follow the general pattern. It would seem that the particular > speaker you mention goes on to elide (or perhaps devoice?) the initial > vowel as well, given its atonic position before a tonic antepenultimate > vowel (which is a somewhat atypical stress pattern for Spanish). > > --John Q. > Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ 1d. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 8:04 pm ((PDT)) On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 09:30:48PM -0400, John Q wrote: > On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 18:07:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote: > > >Interesting. I know an older Spanish speaker who consistently elides > >the _s_ in _spiritu_ (I don't know enough Spanish to be able to tell > >if she does that with other words containing _s_). Is this a > >dialectal occurrence, or just a personal speech peculiarity? > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Well, the Spanish word is "espíritu" so the elision of the > syllable-final /s/ would follow the general pattern. It would seem > that the particular speaker you mention goes on to elide (or perhaps > devoice?) the initial vowel as well, given its atonic position before > a tonic antepenultimate vowel (which is a somewhat atypical stress > pattern for Spanish). [...] If the correct word is _espiritu_, then probably she's pronouncing it [E"pi:rItu], and it's just my non-Spanish ears failing to pick up the initial vowel or failing to analyse word boundaries correctly. After all, it's notoriously hard to recognize word boundaries in a foreign language, esp. one that I'm not even actively learning. :) T -- Marketing: the art of convincing people to pay for what they didn't need before which you can't deliver after. Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ 1e. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "John Q" jquijad...@gmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 9:41 pm ((PDT)) On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 20:02:47 -0700, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote: > >If the correct word is _espiritu_, then probably she's pronouncing it >[E"pi:rItu], and it's just my non-Spanish ears failing to pick up the >initial vowel or failing to analyse word boundaries correctly. After >all, it's notoriously hard to recognize word boundaries in a foreign >language, esp. one that I'm not even actively learning. :) > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yeah, and for as easy (relatively speaking) as Spanish grammar is to learn compared to most other languages, it is usually very difficult for students to understand it when hearing it spoken due to the rapidity of speech which Spanish phonology allows plus the great difficulty in figuring out the word boundaries. --John Q. Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ 1f. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" lehtinen.j...@gmail.com Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 4:06 am ((PDT)) > > According to my knowledge of Spain, it is mostly a southern thing, but it > seems to be creeping northward. The conditions of the sound change are > rather place-dependent, as is the final point of the sound change. In > Murcia all syllable-final /s/'s are deleted, and the vowel before becomes > lax, giving Murcian Spanish a ten-vowel system. In Granada syllable-final > /s/ is changed into [h], sometimes becoming aspiration on the vowel before, > in rapid speech becoming inaudible to my ears. I know some people in > Valencia who speak Spanish natively and who only delete /s/ now and then. > If I remember correctly (I haven't been there for almost a year) /s/ is > more unstable in front of /t/ than in front of /p/ and /k/, which may (or > may not) be due to /s/ and /t/ (at least in that particular accent) to not > have exactly the same point of articulation, leading to some lingual > acrobatics to pronounce /-st-/ if no assimilation or lenition happens. Something similar happens on the Canaries as well. The end point there seems to be a very weak [h] which I was seldom able to hear properly when staying there. Don't ask me anything else about the accent there, I stayed on La Palma for a while but due to international friends did quite much worse learning the language than what I would have wanted. I still managed to get the bad habit of saying [grasia] for gracias. -Jyri Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ 1g. Re: Spanish s as h Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" leolucas1...@gmail.com Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 6:41 am ((PDT)) In Brazilian Portuguese, this also happens in uncarefully pronounced final-syllable s not immediately followed by vowel, usually in more common words (mesmo, nós). Até mais! Leonardo 2013/6/20 MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com>: > Where is s spoken as h in Spanish-speaking world? What are the conditions > for this sound change? > > stevo Messages in this topic (10) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 2.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters Posted by: "Douglas Koller" douglaskol...@hotmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 7:37 pm ((PDT)) > Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200 > From: gijsstri...@gmail.com > Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters > To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu > On 19 June 2013 04:41, Douglas Koller <douglaskol...@hotmail.com> wrote: > >> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:14:53 -0500 > >> From: carra...@gmail.com > >> I have briefly > >> considered capitalizing DJ and CH together rather than Dj and Ch, but > >> haven't ever actually done it as it looks weird to me. > > Yeah, I don't go there either. IJsland? Thank you, no. :) > In handwritten Dutch, it looks more like ÿ or its capitalized > equivalent, *My* cursive "ij" certainly looks like "ÿ". I stumbled on *typed* "ÿ" for Dutch "ij" for the first time online some time last year and was suitably thrilled (apparently, one can/could even eschew the dots: "yzer" ?). Too kewl. And so I noted with interest the Jack Johnson was using it in earnest for his Evidun/Nieuenederlands. But even he seems to have uppercase "¾" and "IJ" running concurrently. "¾" isn't immediately intuitive to me, but it's easy enough to get used to, and surely there are fonts out there where it's just a glorified bigger version of "ÿ". > and there are plenty examples of the digraph in > non-handwritten Dutch where it's clearly represented as a single > letter. > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Signboard-slijterij.jpg Ooo, me like. Does the spelling "kooper" place it pre-war? The sign has an older feel to it (sans "kooper", I would've guessed late 50s/early 60s). I know you just proffered this by way of example, but one wonders if the "broken U" would work (as well) if the sign were oriented horizontally. And you couldn't get away with it in, say, Fraktur :D (though a different fun ligature could certainly be created there). I don't pretend to understand any of it (people start talking ascii, unicode, bitmaps, and the like, and I glaze over), but now that the technology is *here*, why *can't* one make some ß-equivalently-kewl ligature for "ij" ("ÿ" isn't incredibly sexy, but it'll do) that would make Dutch even more uniquely Dutch-y? :) > That said, I can imagine it's weird for people not used to it. > Different expectations and all that. Just so. "¾sland" -- yessssssssssssssss. Kou Messages in this topic (31) ________________________________________________________________________ 2.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 7:58 pm ((PDT)) On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 10:37:31PM -0400, Douglas Koller wrote: > > Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200 > > From: gijsstri...@gmail.com > > Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters > > To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu [...] > > and there are plenty examples of the digraph in non-handwritten > > Dutch where it's clearly represented as a single letter. > > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Signboard-slijterij.jpg > > Ooo, me like. Does the spelling "kooper" place it pre-war? The sign > has an older feel to it (sans "kooper", I would've guessed late > 50s/early 60s). I know you just proffered this by way of example, but > one wonders if the "broken U" would work (as well) if the sign were > oriented horizontally. And you couldn't get away with it in, say, > Fraktur :D (though a different fun ligature could certainly be created > there). I don't pretend to understand any of it (people start talking > ascii, unicode, bitmaps, and the like, and I glaze over), but now that > the technology is *here*, why *can't* one make some > ß-equivalently-kewl ligature for "ij" ("ÿ" isn't incredibly sexy, but > it'll do) that would make Dutch even more uniquely Dutch-y? :) [...] The Unicode characters already exist: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/132/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/133/index.htm It's just a matter of tweaking existing fonts to make a nice ligature for it. :) T -- The early bird gets the worm. Moral: ewww... Messages in this topic (31) ________________________________________________________________________ 2.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters Posted by: "Douglas Koller" douglaskol...@hotmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 9:02 pm ((PDT)) > Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 19:57:02 -0700 > From: hst...@quickfur.ath.cx > Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters > To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu > On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 10:37:31PM -0400, Douglas Koller wrote: > > I don't pretend to understand any of it (people start talking > > ascii, unicode, bitmaps, and the like, and I glaze over), but now that > > the technology is *here*, why *can't* one make some > > ß-equivalently-kewl ligature for "ij" ("ÿ" isn't incredibly sexy, but > > it'll do) that would make Dutch even more uniquely Dutch-y? :) > The Unicode characters already exist: > http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/132/index.htm > http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/133/index.htm > It's just a matter of tweaking existing fonts to make a nice ligature > for it. :) Glaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaze. XP Kou Messages in this topic (31) ________________________________________________________________________ 2.4. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters Posted by: "G. van der Vegt" gijsstri...@gmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 11:45 pm ((PDT)) On 21 June 2013 04:37, Douglas Koller <douglaskol...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200 >> From: gijsstri...@gmail.com >> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters >> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu >> In handwritten Dutch, it looks more like ÿ or its capitalized >> equivalent, > > *My* cursive "ij" certainly looks like "ÿ". I stumbled on *typed* "ÿ" for > Dutch "ij" for the first time online some time last year and was suitably > thrilled (apparently, one can/could even eschew the dots: "yzer" ?). Too > kewl. And so I noted with interest the Jack Johnson was using it in earnest > for his Evidun/Nieuenederlands. But even he seems to have uppercase "Ÿ" and > "IJ" running concurrently. "Ÿ" isn't immediately intuitive to me, but it's > easy enough to get used to, and surely there are fonts out there where it's > just a glorified bigger version of "ÿ". It's not just with cursive. I've scanned a quickly prepared sample of my handwriting < https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2757345/handwriting.png > which is not remotely cursive. I believe it should be fairly easy to read, but here's how this translates to good ol' ASCII Grijs IJsland Jan Uurwerk Index Bijectie (syllable break between the i and j, so they are separate.) Bijeen (syllable break after the ij, so they are a single entity.) Xylofoon Most of this is to display the specifics of my handwriting and how it distinguishes between some cases. In particular, Dutch capital Us tend to have (in my experience) that little hook. Probably to help disambiguate it from a hastily written IJ. And also because there actually are cases where the ij sequence is treated as two /different/ letters instead of one, in those cases where the two characters actually represent something that isn't the same as what the proper digraph/letter means. The latter cases are admittedly rare, and in most cases, for written Dutch, there's not much _need_ to distinguish, but there's a reason that the 'IJ' is considered one of the two 25th letters of the Dutch alphabet. (The y, aka 'griekse ij'/'y-grec' <greek y/ij> is considered the other.) PS: I believe that most people who spell IJ/ij as Y/y are writing Afrikaans. Exceptions may exist, but I don't know of any. Messages in this topic (31) ________________________________________________________________________ 2.5. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" danny.c.bow...@gmail.com Date: Fri Jun 21, 2013 4:52 am ((PDT)) 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? The native Angosey scripts use an initial-medial glyph system. There are no spaces between words, so in a sense YouWriteLikeThisInAngosey. I would not call the initials capitals and the medials lowercase as it serves a purely orthographic system. I did come up with a cursive substitution code when I was 12 that distinguished between lowercase and 2 types of capitals: proper nouns and sentence onsets. However, I soon decided that 78 symbols were a bit much and ended up writing everything in lowercase. Danny 2013/6/21 G. van der Vegt <gijsstri...@gmail.com> > On 21 June 2013 04:37, Douglas Koller <douglaskol...@hotmail.com> wrote: > >> Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:50:13 +0200 > >> From: gijsstri...@gmail.com > >> Subject: Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters > >> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu > >> In handwritten Dutch, it looks more like ÿ or its capitalized > >> equivalent, > > > > *My* cursive "ij" certainly looks like "ÿ". I stumbled on *typed* "ÿ" > for Dutch "ij" for the first time online some time last year and was > suitably thrilled (apparently, one can/could even eschew the dots: "yzer" > ?). Too kewl. And so I noted with interest the Jack Johnson was using it in > earnest for his Evidun/Nieuenederlands. But even he seems to have uppercase > "Ÿ" and "IJ" running concurrently. "Ÿ" isn't immediately intuitive to me, > but it's easy enough to get used to, and surely there are fonts out there > where it's just a glorified bigger version of "ÿ". > > It's not just with cursive. I've scanned a quickly prepared sample of > my handwriting < > https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2757345/handwriting.png > which is > not remotely cursive. > > I believe it should be fairly easy to read, but here's how this > translates to good ol' ASCII > > Grijs > IJsland > Jan > Uurwerk > Index > Bijectie (syllable break between the i and j, so they are separate.) > Bijeen (syllable break after the ij, so they are a single entity.) > Xylofoon > > Most of this is to display the specifics of my handwriting and how it > distinguishes between some cases. > > In particular, Dutch capital Us tend to have (in my experience) that > little hook. Probably to help disambiguate it from a hastily written > IJ. > > And also because there actually are cases where the ij sequence is > treated as two /different/ letters instead of one, in those cases > where the two characters actually represent something that isn't the > same as what the proper digraph/letter means. > > The latter cases are admittedly rare, and in most cases, for written > Dutch, there's not much _need_ to distinguish, but there's a reason > that the 'IJ' is considered one of the two 25th letters of the Dutch > alphabet. (The y, aka 'griekse ij'/'y-grec' <greek y/ij> is considered > the other.) > > PS: I believe that most people who spell IJ/ij as Y/y are writing > Afrikaans. Exceptions may exist, but I don't know of any. > Messages in this topic (31) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 3a. Re: What do you call the damn thing! Posted by: "Douglas Koller" douglaskol...@hotmail.com Date: Thu Jun 20, 2013 8:41 pm ((PDT)) > Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:47:46 -0500 > From: gacor...@gmail.com > Subject: Re: What do you call the damn thing! > To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu > I call it a "remote". A Chinese friend informs me that the Chinese is é¥æ§, > which appears to be a direct calque of the English "remote control" (é¥ yao2 > "far, remote, distant"; æ§ kong4 "to control"). She said é¥æ§å¨ > yao2kong4qi4 > "remote control device" is also acceptable. A calque, certainly, but I imagine it was truncated. Like "When in Rome.", full stop, doesn't make a whole lotta sense unless you already know the entire expression, and "remote", in English, by itself would be a little opaque without a history of "remote control" behind it, so, too, I'm guessing, "é¥æ§". "éé " yao2yuan3 (remote) + "æ§å¶ "kong4zhi4" (control) = éé æ§å¶ Start with that for a while, let the masses settle into it, then at the tipping point, take the first one of each: é¥æ§ Hardly a new phenomenon: ç°å¢ huan2jing4 (environment) + ä¿è· bao3hu4 (protection) = ç°å¢ä¿è· => ç°ä¿ 空氣 kong1qi4 (air) + èª¿ç¯ tiao2jie2 (adjusting) = ç©ºæ°£èª¿ç¯ => 空調 (air conditioner) ? å³é chuan2song4 (transmit/convey) + ç件 zhen1jian4 (actual documents) = å³éç件 => å³ç (fax) I suspect that's what's going on. (unless one is being specifically technical, glomming å¨'s and æ©'s onto these feels to non-native me like saying "channel changer" or "clicker" in English; c'mon, Pops, cut off your queue and join us in the 21st century, won't you?) Meanwhile, over by the mouth of the Tumen, the Géarthçins are most likely calling it a "klébvöks", a calque-y "remote control" that simply blends too well. I suspect there may be a more indigenous term from back in the 70s that, to the chagrin of purists, died of loneliness as the calque elbowed its way in. We'll just have to see. Kou Messages in this topic (16) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/ <*> Your email settings: Digest Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: conlang-nor...@yahoogroups.com conlang-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: conlang-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------