Re: CHAT: Introduction

En réponse à Mark J. Reed :


>No, you are the first.  (Tu es le premier?)  Thanks!
Y'a pas d'quoi ! (et le français était parfait, bravo !)


>What is it about Maggel that makes it so anti-productive?
Ask anybody on the list and they will make you a list of the Maggelish
devilry ;))) . Basically, Maggel is my attempt at the most irregular,
unsensible and unstraightforward language possible, while staying in a
pseudo-European realm (because what makes Maggel what it is is not that
it's alien, but that it's never *completely* alien, thus annoying even mor
people who tend to think there *must* be a method behind all this nonsense
;))))) ). As such, Maggel just cannot have much productive features, as
those tend to make regularities and Maggel doesn't like regularities ;)) .
Not that it doesn't have some: stress placement is perfectly regular in
Maggel, but it's about the only thing there is. Also, Maggel doesn't have
compounding a la English or German. Instead, it tends to take full phrases
and erode them as needed, creating monstruous words that inflect in the
middle in unpredictible ways ;))) . And did I mention the orthography?
Yesterday I happened to work on the personal numerals (numbers used to
count only people, which exist also in Irish Gaelic - Maggel is slightly
Irish-influenced -), and discovered a new pearl of spelling. It's the word
for "six persons", spelled |uhaog| (Maggel has its own script, but it's a
17-letter alphabet derived from the Uncial form of the Roman alphabet, so
the transliteration in Roman alphabet is easy and straightforward :)) ).
I'm not gonna ask people to guess the pronunciation of this word because no
one could ever guess: it's irregular even taking into account the warped
spelling rules of Maggel (which allow for instance |hnh| to be pronounced
[zj\] regularly ;))) ). The pronunciation of |uhaog| is of course, in pure
X-SAMPA: ["G_jyw] ;)))) . I also like |gmeoto|: "eight persons", pronounced
(relatively regularly) [k@"me::] ;))) . And what about |himidu|: "ceremony"
pronounced regularly ["Ce~mptU]? ;)))) Or the fact that feminine words'
(Maggel nouns have three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter) basic
form is not the singular but a plural (Maggel nouns have four numbers,
including two plurals ;)) ), like |ragft|: "women", pronounced [r\a~N],
which is, believe it or not, a purely regular spelling for this
pronunciation ;)))) .

Now, don't wonder why the term "maggelity" has made it into the vocabulary
of the list ;)))) .


>Nothing so exotic.  Actually, the people on this character's planet
>Dankar ['d&nkA`r] are visually indistinguishable from Terrans.
>(Hey, I wanted him to be able to have a secret identity without
>shapeshifting.  Gimme a break!).
LOL.

>   Of course, it will eventually
>turn out that this is no coincidence, but so far it's something
>of a mystery.
Hehe, I can imagine ;))) .

>Nor do his powers come from his alienness.  Dankarans are normally no
>more "super" than humans, whether at home or on Earth.  His ability
>- to control gravity - comes from a crystal he carries, made of a
>mineral native to Dankar.  However, his family seems to be
>unique in their ability to harness this power directly - an ability
>they used long ago to conquer most of the planet.
So he is a prince in his planet, or something equivalent?

>   Most Dankarans
>consider the old stories of magic rocks used to establish a dynasty
>to be nothing but fairy tales.  Dankaran science has observed that
>the crystals can occasionally trigger minor gravitic fluctuations
>in their area, and assume the legends to have been inspired by this
>property, but have not discovered any way to do anything useful
>with it.  Yet.  In the future, Dankaran "hypercrystals" will be
>the basis of FTL travel for a galaxy-spanning civilization, using
>technology to do what the ancient family did naturally - but
>that's the future.
>
>Anyway. :)
Nice. I guess my alien superheroin is pretty different. Energie (as she
calls herself - "she", because she prefers to "solidify" as a woman when
she takes human form -) was a scientist of her planet of origin. She left
her planet about to explode using the prototype of a new type of space-time
travelling ship she was working on. Not being finished, the space-time jump
was completely uncontrolled and the prototype was destroyed on landing on
our planet at our time. Like anyone on her planet, her body isn't solid,
but made of pure energy (a bit like the aliens of Earth: Final Conflict,
but I got the idea more than a decade before the show was first aired ;))
), and she has the ability to morph into any solid matter (animate or not)
without losing her intelligence nor power. And under energetic form, she
can use her energy in many different ways :) .

Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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