Re: Graeca sine flexione

On 5/4/07, T. A. McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> There's U+0194 Ɣ in Latin Extended B, noted as "African", which's
> associated lowercase is the IPA's LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA U+0263 ɣ.
> OTOH, most latin gammas look quite different from the greek gamma (and
> the one shown for Wakhi), so these mightn't be the intended characters:
> For this reason I've never considered the African languages that use
> gamma in the latin alphabet to be mixing and matching.
I just recently read something on how IPA letters that look as if they
come from Greek aren't, because they're intended to fit into the Latin
alphabet typographically. For example, Greek lowercase letters don't
really have serifs, but IPA "Greek" letters such as phi (top and
bottom), beta (bottom), and gamma (top) do.

And the African letters derive from the use of IPA.



On 5/4/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>
> BTW, did you consider using the Cyrillic soft sign for /j/?
No, I never considered that possibility -- I think I went with |j|
because I used that letter in Latin as well and because it exists in
Serbian. But it is something to think about, particularly given what
you said about my use of the Serbian nj and lj ligatures.

> You used
> the nice Cyrillic ligatures (dunno whether they are considered
> ligatures or letters) of n and l + soft sign (like, say, Serbian)),
> but then went for Latin j for the forced palatalisation.  Are there
> cases where j appears after a regularly palatised consonant?  In Latin
> orthography, the two types of palatalisation seem to collapse to j.
Yes, I've conflated the two kinds of palatalisation, as well as the
regular letter for [j\].

I think if I did introduce Cyrillic soft sign into the Greek
orthography, it would be for forced palatalisation, not for the
stand-alone [j\], so I'd disunify the two. Then, say, "pjo" (which:
forced palatalisation after voiceless consonant, [C]), "vjo" (goods:
forced palatalisation after voiced consonant, [j\]) and "iljo" (sun:
regular palatalisation, [L]) would be similar, and both different from
"jo" (son: voiced palatal fricative, [j\]).

Though the sound in "vjo" and "jo" is the same, [j\], I'm not sure
whether I'd like to use soft sign for the second case, since it's more
of a consonant post-modifier to me than a stand-alone consonant.

And it would be nice if there were glyphs for [c] and [J\] which
contained a soft-sign shape the way there are for [L] and [J] :)

And no, in the current orthography there would be no cases of |j|
after a regularly palatalised consonant: those always precede a vowel.

I'm not sure what to do with Latin, though, for forced palatalisation
-- regular palatalisation is regularly (heh) marked with combining
comma/cedilla below à la Latvian (though combining hacek à la Czech
would also work, though I'm not too partial to notating [c] and [J\]
as variants of [t d] rather than of [k g], and I'm using t-hacek and
d-hacek for [ts dz] right now anyway).


On 5/4/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> NAME
> I've already commented on the name, but still don't know the answer.
> Presumably "Graeca sine flexione" is in imitation of "Latino sine
> flexione",
Yes, it is.

> but the latter is not (Classical) Latin, it is the language's
> own name for itself. _Latino_ is derived according to the rules of LSF
> (i.e. taking the ablative singular form) from the Classical Latin
> 'Latinum' = 'Latin language'.
Ah. This I did not know.

> The LSF for "Greek without flexions" is "Graeco sine flexione".
I see.

> It's true we didn't spot this in the Feb. 2006 thread - (a) What
> language is the name "Graeca sine flexione"?
I suppose you could call it Dog Latin (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Latin ) -- an inept attempt to appear
Latin, rather than any specific language.

With "graeca", I think, derived from an adjective (lingua graeca),
rather than a noun.

So all rather Macaronic and unauthentic.

> and (b) why doesn't GSF
> actually name itself in its own language (just as LSF does)?
As you found, it does have a name for itself (derived from Modern
Greek, true, with its neuter plural/adverbial -ika ending of the kind
used for language names in MG).

I've just always thought of it as "Graeca sine flexione", so that's
been its name in my mind ever since that thread.

> PERSONAL PRONOUNS
> I note the nouns are mainly derived from the accusative case forms, but
> the personal pronouns are clearly derived from _nominative_ forms.
This is true.

I never thought about this explicitly. If I had to guess at my
subconscious motives, perhaps it was because pronouns are more highly
inflected than nouns, and using an accusative pronoun for the subject
of a sentence seemed wrong to me. (Having a nominative pronoun as the
object didn't strike me so much, perhaps because I didn't have that
many non-3 pronominal objects in my texts so far.)

> This
> is in marked contrast to LSF where we find _me_ = I/me, and _te_ = you
> [singular]. Also in AFAIK all English pidgins and creoles the 1st person
> is derived from _me_, not from _I_.
Also in Romance languages, e.g. colloquial Italian which has "lui" and
"lei" in the third person supplanting "ello"(?) and "ella".

Or even in English in some situations: "Him and me went to the cinema"
is something a fair number of people would say (though not all of
those would say *"Him went to the cinema").

> In particular I find the use of γο to me "me" very odd.
I preferred it to an εγο with penultimate stress :)

In a very early draft, I also played some games with /i/ vs. /j/ in
endings to try to ensure that more words were stressed in the same
place as in Modern Greek even with the penultimate stress rule (e.g.
"ciljo" instead of current "cilio" for "thousand").

I wonder what the pronouns would become, then? Presumable me / se /
afto; mas / sas / aftos -- though that means that 1+2pl are
homophonous with the possessive forms, which is a bit icky and leads
to ambiguities of the kind Modern Greek has, e.g. "O pateras mou eipe"
= "My father said" or "The father said to me"; in GSF, we might have
"Me theli na fai to skilo mas" = "I want to eat our dog" or "I want
our dog to eat us".

Possibly mena / sena for 1+2sg, after Modern Greek, but the shorter
forms might be nicer. And/or to / tos for 3sg/pl, but I'm not sure
whether I want them to be homophonous with the definite article.

Hm, food for thought.

Thank you for your comments!

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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