Re: Phoneme system for my still-unnamed "Language X"

On Wed, 07 September 2005, 14:50 CEST, Julia Simon wrote:

 > For the plosives, the only feasible ways to go seem to be
 > X : X' (your
 > suggestion) and Xh : X (Jeffrey's suggestion), at least
 > for the time
 > being. (I choose to ignore the X : X-with-dot spelling
 > I've seen e.g.
 > in Georgian textbooks, at least until someone gets me a
 > Unicode
 > keyboard. Even a midpoint would be too clumsy to type.
 > Sorry, Carsten. ;)

Oh, I don't mind. I saw BPJ's suggestion only after having
written mine, by the way. I know they're using apostrophes
in Russian transcription to indicate palatalization, so
there's at least one feasible natlang usage. But then, I don't
like apostrophes so very much. I modified my keyboard
settings so that I can enter the middot with AltGr+F, so I
haven't got so many difficulties entering "weird" letters
like n-acute. Don't ask me why F.

 > I've been trying to come up with a system that would give
 > me one
 > grapheme for each phoneme, but for that I'd either have to
 > use
 > internalCaps (which I hate)

That's why I don't like Klingon romanization.

 > So this was a little frustrating and I decided to amuse
 > myself with
 > non-roman alphabets for a while. Now I still don't have a
 > romanization
 > I'm happy with, but I do have a pretty good
 > "hellenization" (using the
 > Greek letters pi : phi : beta for /p_>/ : /p_h/ : /b/),
 > "kartulization" (using the Georgian letters p'ar : phar :
 > ban for
 > /p_>/ : /p_h/ : /b/), and "bharatization" (using the
 > Devanagari
 > letter-bases p(a) : ph(a) : b(a) for /p_>/ : /p_h/ : /b/).
 > Not really
 > useful except for private notes on paper (and not too
 > useful even
 > there, since the only one of these three that I can write
 > with
 > anything resembling speed is the Greek one). But at least
 > I had some
 > fun, and I even managed to assign most of the letters in
 > more or less
 > logical ways in all three cases. ;-)

Waldkater from the ZBB has a conlang called Ar<sigma>eía
(pronounced somewhat like /Ar"Ceja/), where he mixes Latin
and Greek letters. I tryed to mix alphabets myself once, but
I don't think that mixing Latin letters with Greek or
Cyrillic ones is that a good idea because in some fonts, the
design principles (e.g. line heights, general letter shapes)
are partly different for the different, but related
alphabets.

 > I'm
 > using a script for vocabulary generation, and I feel that
 > if I started
 > assigning grapheme combinations to some of the phonemes,
 > it'd get too
 > messy too soon, with random diacritics flying all over the
 > place and
 > possibly causing serious injury to innocent bystanders.
 > :-}

/me imagines a scene like in Hitchkock's "The Birds", mixed
with today's omnipresent risk of terrorist attacks ...

Öyhäälittohyy/Finland (IPA). Last Saturday, clueless
passers-by of a house in downtown Ääkköyättilahtää were
attacked by big swarms of random accents that came to life
due to a failure in a computer algorithm. The little
stingers caused an epedemy-like occurance of "nasal
squiggles" [1] in peoples' speech in the affected region.
Scientists are still curious how something like this could
happen. Politicians as well as the local police notice that
a terrorist attack by the radical Islamist linguists terror
network, Al-Pakhtam-i-Allah-al-Muhammad, is not to be
excluded ...

("IPA" stands for International Press Agency, d'oh. Any
reseblance between real and fictional names is not intended
and purely coincidental.)

On Wed, 07 September 2005, 15:20 CEST, Julia Simon wrote,
quoting me:

 >> Let's have a look... forgive me stupid mistakes, since
 >> I'm
 >> listening to Farin Urlaub's new solo album right now that
 >> I've bought just today. *sings along*
 >
 > New solo album? I wasn't even aware of any *old* solo
 > albums of his...
 > <turns a lovely shade of green with envy>

Yes, his first one was "Endlich Urlaub", I think it's from
2003 or something. For you others: Farin Urlaub (word game:
"Fahr in'n Urlaub" -> "go on holidays", his artist name)
is the band leader of the German band "Die Ärzte".

Carsten


[1] Cross-Reference to the ZBB: In a topic some weeks ago,
we joked about people like Edo Nyland et al who try to
relate languages "mit dem Brecheisen" (no idea how to
translate that into English). Someone suggested that all
languages with a "nasal squiggle" must be related, which led
someone to say that he could imagine an old linguistics
professor telling his students, "But don't forget to listen
closely for the nasal squiggles!". It was more fun than this
might sound like. Search the ZBB for "nasal squiggles" if
you want to read the whole story. I don't know if it's still
there, though, because it was in "Ephemera" I think. Threads
in this subforum get deleted after a week usually.

NB: Why can't Outlook Express get the linebreaks in quotations
right? It's still a mystery to me.

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