Re: OT: Conlangea Dreaming

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

<snip>

> Happens a lot with the Asian-Americans I've known.  My parents chose not
> to, or weren't aware of it.  <shrug>
Yeah, you'd have to ask them, if you really want to know. It could be
either...

<snip>

> I like.  :-)  In Chevraqis you theoretically could get confused between
> two people with the same name, one male, one female.  OTOH you'd get
> confused anyway even if they were the same sex.  Epithets (?) like "the
> younger" or "the calligrapher" or "the soldier" are pretty common anyway.
Ajuk has that problem too, in colloquial speech. Ajuk has quite a few
ambiguities that don't pose much of a problem once you consider context,
but the young'uns embrace it and use ambiguous phrases a lot. They use
the "unknown" a lot as well, except where it's completely neccessary.

BTW, there's a reflexive affix for the verb, so a sentance like "One
told one it was cold outside" could not be interpreted as "One told
oneself it was cold outside", but it's up to the listener to figure out
which to people the speaker is talking about, and which fills each role.
Usually, something like that will only be used if the subject from the
sentance before is the subject of that sentance, but not always.

Needless to say, the parents & grandparents don't care for this at all,
and make every effort to point it out to the young'uns, but it doesn't
seem to work.

> The one thing that gives me a headache is the fact that monks are
> Asian-like monks, not Western-like monks, but in the story there's a
> senior monk who's also a woman, and I'm worried it'll confuse readers.
> ObConlang, the Chevraqis for monk is probably "one who seeks
> enlightenment."  (Stupid-obvious, but hey.)
I'm not sure of all the details: What precisely would be confusing about
it? I don't know much about Chevraqis.

Ajuk would probably have a word similar to that as well, because Ajuk
likes mashing to words together and treating it like it was always just
one word.

--
Robert