Re: Graeca sine flexione

Hi!

Paul Bennett writes:
> On Thu, 03 May 2007 10:41:40 -0400, Henrik Theiling
> <theiling@...>  wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> >
> > Philip Newton writes:
> >> ...
> >> Have a look at the introduction at http://gsf.wunschzetel.de/intro and
> >> the sitemap at http://gsf.wunschzetel.de/sitemap and browse some of
> >> the pages from there (the ones towards the beginning tend to have more
> >> content).
>
> > Very nice!  Will need more time to devour everything, though.
>
> I could not agree more, on both counts. The orthography makes my brain
> hurt a little bit, but I'm sure I'll get used to it.
I had the same feeling, too.  It was quite confusing to read 'uranos'
in Greek GSF because the 'ou' is replaced by simple 'y'.  In the same
way, 'to onoma sy' looks strange.  So this conlang includes a spelling
reform for modern Greek. :-)

Although for something called 'X sine flexione' I would probably have
used Old rather than Modern language as a basis but that is just
personal preference.  Philip's new conlang is really fun!

E.g. I liked the careful selection of analytical forms.
'hagiasthêto' ~ 'as ajasi' is very nicely crafted.  What is Modern
Greek for this?

> > What's funny is that it seems in the era of Unicode and nice fonts
> > that have uniform faces for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, conlangers
> > start to use mixed orthographies.  I like this a lot
>
> Indeed. I'd even go so far as to recommend it where appropriate for
> added  realism and/or spice.
Yes!  And it leads to the need for strange decisions sometimes: due to
the (unfortunate, from the conlangers view) coincidence of capital
letters where the small letters are different, it is sometimes hard to
decide from which alphabet to use some character.  Examples are:

   - Greek nu,    where the capital coincides with Latin N
   - Greek mu,    where the capital coincides with Latin M
   - Greek eta,   where the capital coincides with Latin H
   - Greek gamma, where the capital coincides with Cyrillic g
   ...

Most of the Greek lower case chars that fall into this category are
really nice, I think (e.g. mu and eta), so I felt is was a pity that
the capitals coincide with Latin.

OTOH, some other characters let you have more choice: you could have
three distinct Ls, since the corresponding characters look different
in all three alphabets.

(I need to make a conlang that has /S/ in order to use Cyrillic 'sha'.)

> I mixed Greek, Coptic and Hebrew characters in Western-branch
> Thagojian v3
Ah, interesting.  How did Coptic fit in visually?  Do you have
samples?

>  (currently without a real name) and a whole mixed bag
> for Terzemian  (Eastern-branch Thagojian v3) -- one Latin script using
> relatively pure  Latin-1 (plus l-slash and a few dots 'n' squiggles),
I love 'x diaeresis' (although I never used it).  I *love* diaereses,
anyway.  Is it because I'm German?  But I love acutes, too.  Is it
because I live so close to France (only 6km)?? :-P

**Henrik

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