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There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Multiple wh-words
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: a-umlaut (was Re: Epicene words)
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: numbers from 1 to 10 by Sean P. Miller
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Mephali numbers
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: "if that makes any difference"
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: "if that makes any difference"
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: Welcome Christine! And the "woman" issue. WAS: lunatic survey
From: Cristina Escalante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: "if that makes any difference"
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: "if that makes any difference"
From: Tristan McLeay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: numbers from 1 to 10 by Sean P. Miller
From: Sean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: Romaji as syllabary
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: "if that makes any difference"
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: TECH: email problem?
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Pangram (was Re: My first romlang sentence)
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: "if that makes any difference"
From: Ivan Baines <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:56:20 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Multiple wh-words
Ray Brown wrote:
> BTW I get the impression that the actual use of "whom" in _spoken_ English
> is confined to parts of north America. Is that so?
Frankly, it's all but dead in spoken American, save for a few occasionally
careful (read: pedantic???) speakers like me....and even we aren't always
consistent.
Certainly in this neck
> of the woods (southern UK) it would sound odd & somewhat affected in
> normal colloquial speech. IME it's even rare in more formal spoken modes.
"Odd, affected" may be a little strong. When it's used is a matter of
register-- one wouldn't bother with "whom" discussing car problems with a
mechanic. It's most likely to occur in academic or other "careful" speech
and writing, but even there I'd say it's 50-50 at best :-((
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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:09:36 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: a-umlaut (was Re: Epicene words)
Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>> > > _halera_ (< *hal-ir-a) `healer'
> >
> > Is this a-umlaut? I mean the *-ir-a > -era part of that?
>
> It is.
I spotted that too, and suspected as much......
> > Does it occur in natlangs?
>
> I think it occurs in some North Germanic languages, though I am
> not sure about that.
>
Something similar happens sporadically in Oceanic/Polynesian languages,
where any of the following are possible:
*CaCi > CaCe, or CeCi; similarly for *CiCa
*CaCu > CaCo, or CoCu; likewise for *CuCa
More often these vowel sequences survive unchanged.
But it's simply an unexpected assimilation, and is never called "umlaut"
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Message: 3
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:30:53 -0500
From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: numbers from 1 to 10 by Sean P. Miller
Didn't Mark "zompist" Rosenfelder already do this? He's got scores of numbers
from one to ten in natural and constructed languages:
http://zompist.com/last.htm
At any rate, here's mine; cardinals appear in zompist, but not the ordinal
numbers:
Cardinal:
uon
tibro
elin
frem
nibro
ksykso
tsabre
uyno
temra
dleyn/tleyn
Ordinal:
OLD NEW
uelo uonod
tilo tibrod
ilno elinod
frimo fremod
nilo nibrod
ksyko ksyksod
tsabo tsabrod
yno uynod
temo temrod
leno dleynod
Difference being the old preceded the noun, the new follow and are considered
adjectival.
----- Original Message -----
From: janko gorenc
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 12:03 PM
Subject: numbers from 1 to 10 by Sean P. Miller
Hi Sean,
My name is Janko Gorenc.
I'm collecting numbers from various systems in different languages.
Could you please send me numbers from 1 to 10 in your conlangs.
Thank you for your help!
Janko Gorenc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:01:28 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mephali numbers
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 08:44:05AM -0800, janko gorenc wrote:
> Hi Geoff
Who the heck is Geoff?
> I ask you send me numbers 1-10 in Mephali, Shalakar, Curnalis, or
> other your conlangs.
Sure. I never developed numbers in Shalakar, and I haven't yet done so
in Curnalis, but here's Mephali:
Decimal Mephali CXS
1 jæñ /j&N/
2 ki /ki/
3 slu /Slu/
4 sel /sEl/
5 zuas /zwas/
6 huph /hUp_h/
7 zoñ /ZON/
8 kuo /kwo/
9 ñuañ /NwaN/
10 koñ /kON/
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Message: 5
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:10:17 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "if that makes any difference"
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 02:56:48PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> I'm right-handed but left-eyed, so that gives me mixed-brain dominance
Interesting. I'm right-eyed but it's not really brain dominance; I just
have really bad vision in my left eye, and it's not fully correctible to
20/20 - apparently a leftover result from having lazy eye as a child,
althought the opthamologist says he doesn't see any of the usual
evidence of such a prior condition - only the uncorrectibility.
> I'm straight and I don't hate the bumper sticker because I actually do
> have best friends who are gay;
Well, sure, so do I, but that's not the point. "Some of my best friends
are X" is the bigot's motto, and "straight but not narrow" sounds like a
kindred phrase, along with Seinfeld's "I'm not gay - Not That There's
Anything Wrong With That!" The SBNN stickers just seem like the driver
is going out of their way to point out that they're not gay. "Hey,
there's nothing wrong with being gay, but don't for a minute think that
*I'm* gay! No, sir! That'd be horrible if you thought that!" If
you're concerned about people thinking you're gay, then the unavoidable
implication is that you think there *is* something wrong with it.
Want to show your support? Great - put a pink triangle on your car. If
someone sees it and thinks that you're (gasp) gay yourself, then . . .
SO WHAT? I mean, If someone shows interest in me, regardless of their
sex, I make sure to let them know that I'm not available - happily
married, not polyamorous, yada. But beyond that, it doesn't make one
whit of difference whether anyone thinks I'm gay or straight or whatever.
-Marcos
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Message: 6
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:11:29 +0100
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "if that makes any difference"
Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> >>Anything else I left out? Synaesthetics? Southpaws? Mood disorders?
> >>Goldfish swallowers? lucid dreamers......? :)
>
> I'm a leftie trained to be a rightie by physiotherapists
> who neglected to check out my mom's leftieness.
> I sustained severe brain injury due to an infection shortly
> after my premature birth, and am lame and epileptic as a
> result. I have had my bouts of depression, but they are
> totally explainable by environment. And oh yes, I'm
> as straight as they come (a tit-admirer if ever there
> was one), bespectacled and bearded. I can't guarantee a
> total lack of Lithuanian ancestors, as I have a bunch
> of Ukrainian and Pomeranian ones!
On the subject of mood disorders, my doctor recently told me I probably have a
depression. I'm afraid he's probably right.
Andreas
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Message: 7
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 17:43:47 -0500
From: Cristina Escalante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Welcome Christine! And the "woman" issue. WAS: lunatic survey
Sally wrote:
>
>I guess what I'm interested in is knowing why conlanging in particular
>should draw fewer women than men; I realize that there are probably a
lot
>more women out there who conlang...
>Once I opined, and I may have been wrong, that women on average are
trained
>in American (and perhaps European) society to be practical minded, and
that
>there is something inherently "uncool" in exposing excessive
enthusiasm, or
>involving themselves in pursuits that don't immediately yield some kind
of
>profitable endeavor--such as competing to get into college, graduate
>school,
>or at the very least, being "taken seriously as a professional." These
are
>potent concerns for women these days. And this essentially
"unprofitable"
>aspect of conlanging, of course, furnished a number of questions on my
>survey--its privacy, its seeming inutility, its difficulty as an art
form
>to
>attract "consumers," or to be sold--which seems to be a vital part of
any
>visible craft: poetry, music, painting, model-building; knitting: these
>activities produce things that can be viewed, put in books, put on your
>wall, played on CDs, bought in craft shops. Consumers of conlangs
can't do
>that unless they learn it. The only paying outlet seems to be for film
or
>television, an enviable feat that some conlangers have accomplished!
If
>they appear in novels, it's the novel, usually, not the conlang, that
>sells.
>
>Now I know that things have changed considerably since the sixties, but
I
>wonder if some of these assumptions about female decorum are still in
place
>to a vast extent. Note how many more professional male comedians there
are
>than women
I don't feel as if that ever took place in my life(but then, I'm
oblivious to many social conventions)--there's a big push for females to
take part in the sciences nowadays (hurrah Harvard President), and
thanks to the Bill Gates phenomenon, being a geek is becoming more and
more socially accepted.
As to some of your other statements, it is also worthy to point out the
market studies on video/computer games. I'm no expert on this(I'll have
to go check the facts), but I recall reading some articles on what kind
of games appeal to girls and to boys.
Girls prefer, among other things, games that one doesn't have to learn
by immersion, while boys prefer games that take hours and hours of
practice in order to be played optimally, or reach competence.
Conlanging is definitely a boy-type game, according to these
observations. How many hours have I spent merely looking up the
definitions for the terms used on a discussion on this list, just so
that I could understand what was going on, and how many hours learning
about various other languages!
What female-majority LiveJournals
>out there would attract discussion about conlanging?
Livejournal gives me the shudders, but it is about 2/3 female from what
I remember, so I was wondering about the demographics of
http://www.livejournal.com/community/conlangs
>So what does Tsemol mean? :)
I took it from the Hebrew se'mol, and added a "t", because semol was
taken as an AIM screenname, now it is my name.
--Cristina Tsemol
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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 00:03:40 +0100
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "if that makes any difference"
Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Well, sure, so do I, but that's not the point. "Some of my best friends
> are X" is the bigot's motto, and "straight but not narrow" sounds like a
> kindred phrase, along with Seinfeld's "I'm not gay - Not That There's
> Anything Wrong With That!" The SBNN stickers just seem like the driver
> is going out of their way to point out that they're not gay. "Hey,
> there's nothing wrong with being gay, but don't for a minute think that
> *I'm* gay! No, sir! That'd be horrible if you thought that!" If
> you're concerned about people thinking you're gay, then the unavoidable
> implication is that you think there *is* something wrong with it.
"Concerned" may be a strong word, but I don't like people thinking I'm things
I'm not. I'm not gay, so I don't like people to think I'm gay. I find it
slightly hard to accept that this should imply I think there's something wrong
with being gay, female, old, having a job, being Estonian, Italian, brown-eyed,
... the list goes on.
Andreas
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Message: 9
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 10:16:31 +1100
From: Tristan McLeay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "if that makes any difference"
On 1 Mar 2005, at 6.56 am, Sally Caves wrote:
> My sex is male. My sexual orientation is straight ("but
>> not narrow!" - a bumper sticker I hate, as it sounds too much like
>> "Some
>> of my best friends are gay!"). I'm also right-handed,
>> as well as bearded, brunet, bespectacled, and Alithuanian.
>
> I'm right-handed but left-eyed, so that gives me mixed-brain dominance;
Are you sure? The left-half of *both* your right and left eyes goes to
the right brain, and the right-half of *both* you left and right eyes
goes to the left brain. Unless you have poor muscular control of your
right eye, or almost neglect your right field of vision, I don't think
you can conclude anything about your brain dominance from that. But I'm
not entirely sure that I'm entirely sure I know what you're saying, nor
that I'm entirely sure what eyedness is.
As for me, I seem to be better at tasks like writing that require fine
control with my right hand, and tasks like scrubbing or opening jars
that require strength with my left hand. (OTOH, I have no idea how I'd
feel about changing gears with my right hand.)
--
Tristan.
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Message: 10
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:24:52 -0000
From: Sean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: numbers from 1 to 10 by Sean P. Miller
Hah! I don't have any idea who this Sean guy is ;)
I think he meant to send the e-mail only to me, but sent it to the
list instead. Oh well, I guess we'll get a lot of posts containing
``Who's Sean?'' and ``My numbers are . . .''
Regards,
Sean P. Miller
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Message: 11
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:45:52 -0500
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Romaji as syllabary
"Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1. I am not eniterely happy at the present system where lexical morphemes
> will begin with a consonant + unstressed vowel + stressed vowel. I know
> Fuishiki Okamoto was quite happy with short vowels followed immediately by
> long vowels in Babm, but the similar feature in Bax troubles me a little.
> If the unstressed vowel is either /i/ or /u/ then [j] or [w] could be used
> instead. But what does one do with unstressed /a/ before a stressed vowel?
Here I'll suggest treating unstressed /a/ as aspiration, for example
/paí/ as [p_hi], as a sort of allusion to PIE laryngeals.
> As there are 133 possible CV and another 133 possible VC combos,
> this does not seem to be making the best use of them. It occurs to me
> that in a _briefscript_ one ought to make better use of them.
Should a briefscript allow for some error detection?
> Darn browsers! I test my pages with Mozilla and Opera - and they work OK.
> I've given up trying with Internet Explorer, as my version, at least,
> seems hopeless. But some info please. How do I tell your browser to handle
> Unicode? How do I include IPA symbols the in the html coding? I've tried
> decimal & IE doesn't like that either.
With IE, it appears you need to use CSS font-family: to render
the body with a font containing IPA symbols. Use Character
Map to find an appropriate font. Unlike IE, Mozilla knows
how to do font substitution in cases where a font lacks glyphs
for a given character.
> I guess the only sure way is to create pdf documents - and I don't
> have the software to do that.
Ghostscript is free software that replaces Acrobat Distiller.
--
Damian
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Message: 12
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:56:18 -0800
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "if that makes any difference"
on 2/28/05 9:58 AM, Ivan Baines at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> Anything else I left out? Synaesthetics? Southpaws? Mood disorders?
>> Goldfish swallowers? lucid dreamers......? :)
>
> I'm a straight left-hander with negligible goldfish experience. I'm
> unsure about the synaesthesia thing - does it count if you don't
> physically "see" anything but have strong and unexplainable colour
> associations for things that come in sequences?
>
> IB.
Yes that is a very mild form of synaethesia. Some people also associate
lettres with colours.
You can websearch for more on synaethesia/synethesia - it's a fascinating
subject area and there are many websites and even an on-line community or
two that are quite active.
--
Hanuman Zhang
"Any sufficiently advanced music is indistinguishable from noise" (after
Arthur C. Clarke's aphorism that any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguisable from magic.)" - John Chalmers, in email response to the
quote _The Difference between Music and Noise is all in your Head_
"... simple, chaotic, anarchic and menacing.... This is what people of today
have lost and need most - the ability to experience permanent bodily and
mental ecstasy, to be a receiving station for messages howling by on the
ether from other worlds and nonhuman entities, those peculiar short-wave
messages which come in static-free in the secret pleasure center in the
brain." - Slava Ranko (Donald L. Philippi)
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Message: 13
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:56:19 -0800
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: TECH: email problem?
on 2/28/05 10:27 AM, Carsten Becker at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hey!
>
> On Monday 28 February 2005 04:49 +0100, Jonathan Chang
> wrote:
>
>> It seems that I am not getting all the Conlang email I
>> should be getting from the email system I have.
>> Is there some way to check this? Solve this?
>> Thanx...
>
> I might be a little too late, but maybe your mail provider
> supports a web-login where you can switch on and off a spam
> filter. <SNIP>
My mistake. I am now receiving everything ::imitates drowning sloth::
--
Hanuman Zhang, _Gomi no sensei_ [Master of junk]
"To live is to scrounge, taking what you can in order to survive. So,
since living is scrounging, the result of our efforts is to amass a pile
of rubbish."
- Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi, China, 4th Century BCE
"The most beautiful order is a heap of sweepings piled up at random."
- Heraclitus, Greece, 5th Century BCE
Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.
[Latin > "Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation."]
" jinsei to iu mono wa, kinchou na geijyutsu to ieru deshou "
[Japanese > "one can probably say that 'life' is a precious artform"]
"Art should be something that liberates your soul." - Keith Haring
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Message: 14
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:56:19 -0800
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Pangram (was Re: My first romlang sentence)
on 2/28/05 5:25 AM, Henrik Theiling at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Caeruleancentaur wrote:
>> Has anyone written a sentence in his conlang(s) that contains all the
>> phonemes in the conlang? I'm still working on mine.
>
> I composed one in Tyl Sjok:
>
> It lu kyngka twxo hw njes. = 'Words make you get rid of enemies early.'
>
> There are not so many phonemes in Tyl Sjok... Unfortunately, 'w' occurs
> twice, otherwise it would be perfect. :-)
>
> It lu kyngka twxo hw njes.
> /?i.t lu k1N.ka t3.Xo t3 njE.s/
> [?It= lu k1Nga t3Xo t3 njEs=]
>
> it - to say; word
> lu - make: resultative causative particle
> kyngka - to loose
> twxo - enemy
> hw - to happen at a certain time
> njes - to rise; as a time: early
>
> There are probably a thousand other interpretations of the sentence
> due to the ambiguous structure of the language. Just read it like
> Ancient Chinese.
>
> **Henrik
Niceness. Good to know that there is another "fan" of Ancient Chinese on the
list. Ambiguity is a rather interesting conlang aesthetic IMHO - it adds a
poetic/metapoetic dimensionality to the conlang that goes beyond mere or
simple idiomatic usage.
I must say I think I have visited your website a few times. I lost the URL
when I switched from Mac OS 9 to iMac OS 9.2... I'll get it from langmaker.
--
Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger
Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...
"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_
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Message: 15
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005 01:02:03 -0000
From: Ivan Baines <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "if that makes any difference"
> > does it count if you don't
> > physically "see" anything but have strong and unexplainable colour
> > associations for things that come in sequences?
>
> Yes that is a very mild form of synaethesia. Some people also associate
> lettres with colours.
Letters are among the main things I have colours for! Letters come
in a sequence, y'see. Other things include musical notes (I've been
a musician most of my life), and numbers and days of the week (to a
lesser degree).
IB.
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