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Re: Plastic Surgery on a Conlang

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, April 20, 2002, 16:53
At 11:37 pm +0200 19/4/02, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>: > >> >> Problems: >> ********* >> >> (1) Stop+Nasal clusters, such as in |getne| "fearing". >> > >What, you don't like them? I like those exotic clusters
So do I :)
>......on the other hand! |nt| is boring!
...unless it's a prenasalized plosive! In all the sub-Saharan African languages I've come across {getne} would consist of two _open_ syllables: [ge nte]. But the plain ol' Amero-European syllabification [gen te] is rather boring.
> >> (2) Stop+Stop+Fricative clusters, such as in |noggze|. >> > >Here again, I find them aesthetically quite pleasing. Too bad you don't like >them...
Nah - too bizarre & I could never pronounce them. I go along with Christian on that one.
>> (3) Ugly typographical juxtapositions due to non-standard letter >> values, as in |kcare| or |kwaq|. >> > ><sob> I like them all!!! Why change?!!
Yes, I agree - I don't find them typographically ugly at all.
>Oh well, what's my opinion, since it comes from a man who is reviving a >language which has monsters like |ibolteadg| pronounced ['poUK] (X-SAMPA, >except that ' marks primary stress), or |himidu| pronounced ['CE~mptU], and >what about |imuohf| pronounced ['mbu:]? :))) Until now, the nearly worst stays >|iragft| pronounced ['xa~N] :)), though |eidriuojha| pronounced ['itrYj\@] is >near in the competition :)) .
Ach y fi! It makes English look almost regular :)))) [snip]
> >> (2) I changed the syllabification rules to draw the syllable boundary >> between two consonants, regardless of stops. This means all words >> like |kotre| are now pronounced /"kOtr@/, thus rendering the >> spelling |kottre| obsolete. As a side effect, the pronunciation >> /"ko:tr@/ is now impossible. Too bad, I kinda liked it.
You could be less prescriptive. In the prosodic rules of ancient Greek and Classical Latin verse, such words could be syllabified as _either_ /kot re/ _or_ /ko tre/. [snip]
> >> The public transliteration will reflect pronunciation rather than >> phonemic structure. For reasons of personal aesthetic preference, >> glides will be written as vowels except intervocally, and /S/, /Z/ >> will be represented as s' and z', since I find sh, zh or j, x to >> be less pleasant.
Personally, I do find {s'} and {z'} typographically ugly. I find nothing unpleasing in the French use of {j} for /Z/ nor, for that matter, the Maltese use of {x} = /S/. Actually, I've always found the Norwegian {sj} = /S/ aesthetically pleasing.
>>I'll also use c for /k/. >>
A la Quenyaise. It seems to me, indeed, that the 'plastic surgery' Christian is giving his conlang is making more Quenya-like. If that is the intention, then fair enough. [snip]
>> >> Bottom line: >> ************ >> >> So, the formerly ugly words |getne|, |kcare|, |nokkce| and |kwaq| will >> become =gente=, =chare=, =nocse= and =cuang=, or even =noxe= and >> =quang=. It's that nice? =) >> > >Hehe, it looks like your aesthetic preferences match quite well Tolkien's >:)) .
That's how it seems to me also. I don't say that it's either 'a good thing' or 'a bad thing' in itself. If Christian finds it more to his liking, then fine - but I like the 'more exotic' feel of former words, except for {nokkce}! [snip]
>> Thanx in advance for your -- as always -- prolific feedback...
You're welcome. And thanx in advance for your feedback on my 'A BrSc a' mail :)) -------------------------------------------------------------- At 12:48 am +0200 20/4/02, Christian Thalmann wrote:
>> In a message dated 4/19/02 01.34.11 PM, cinga@GMX.NET writes: > >> Yep, spelin reeforms are always rather interesting. It likes like yours >> is more Romance-like now (except _cuang_ looks a bit South East Asian, >> hehe... a lil spiciness there to break up "the usual Romance" look of the >> language, eh?) > >Yep, the new transliteration is intended to look like the civilized >classy high language of some ancient culture,
But only if it had a Latinate transliteration. The way I (and many others) transliterate ancient Greek gives it a very different effect (lots of Ks, and not a {c} in sight). And ancient Egyptian was a pretty classy high language of an ancient culture that had a longer duration than the Classical greek or Classical Roman civilizations; the standard way of transliterating that language in Roman script is quite different from the Latinate style of Quenya.
>but clearly not Latin >or Greek. The vowel letters used for glides in words like =guai= >(linguistic notation |gwaj|) taste a bit celtic to me.
Eh? It looks distinctly like Spanish or Italian. In Breton, Cornish and Welsh it'd be written {gwai} [snip]
> >I never realized how many apostrophes my new transliteration scheme >would produce... but somehow they don't even disturb me. =S'= and >=Z'= could be written with haceks where available.
Yes, please - anything's better than all those apostrophes. Ray. ====================== XRICTOC ANECTH ======================

Replies

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>