Re: Website update

Yoon Ha Lee wrote :

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On Sunday, November 4, 2001, at 01:35 , Kala Tunu wrote:

> Since I (sort of) finished the grammar of my own conlang I
have been
> mainly lurking the list and visiting a number of very nice
conlang
> websites with enough examples to get a feel of the langs,
some of them
> with beautiful maps, drawings, music and songs. I really
have a great
> time browsing them and it made me ashamed of my own shabby
webpage. So I
> took some time recently to update it with examples and a
kind of "teach
> yourself" section which is still under construction. Not
fancy enough
> though. It's too bad the real world consumes so much of
our time. And I
> don't like Geocities so much.
www.geocities.com/kalatunu/index.htm

Don't be ashamed--not everyone has time, and not everyone
has the know-how
*and* time to do funky things with stylesheets and
javascript and
what-have-you.  (My sister regularly puts me to shame, and
then complains
that her server doesn't give her MySQL, to which I can only
meep
uncomprehendingly.)
----------------------------------
MySQL?
um... may I meep too?

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The pronunciation guide gives a lot of "may also be
pronounced as," which
leads me to wonder what the *initial* pronunciation is.  I'm
guessing they'
re taken from "standard" English pronunciation, but in the
case of "c" I'm
not sure whether the "main" pronunciation is [s] or [k] or
something else
entirely.  Would it be possible to put up ASCII-IPA
equivalents for the
consonants (and also the vowels)?
-----------------------------------
Tunu <c> is not a "may also be pronounced" but merely a "may
be pronounced as either..."
So it's pronounced either /ts/, /dz/, /tS/ or /dZ/. Tunu
consonants are defined contrastively to each other.
I'm sorry that I can't ASCIwhatever. I'd say Tunu <c> is an
uvulalveodentopalatofricative on Mondays.
<b> and <t> are more like the <bp> and <dt> in some
excellent touristic teach-yourself Khmer manuals and <l> is
very much a Japanese or Tahitian <r>.
<s> is exactly what a Dutch friend of mine pronounces French
<z>, <s>, <ch> or <j>, that is a single kind of
sibillofricasomething with a nice smile on her face.

-----------------------------------
All in all, I found your grammar/teach-yourself pages quite
thorough for a
work in progress, and easy to read.  :-)  This is a conlang
I wouldn't
mind picking up in my free time, if indeed I ever have free
time again.
<wry g>
----------------------------------
That's very kind of you. This being said, I'd prefer you to
write more Czevraqis stuff in your website. It's fun to
read.
I would never "learn" a conlang myself. I like to read them
aloud and get a feeling of them.
But it's true too that when they're well documented I
definitely learn the little is there. Unfortunately the most
detailed ones like Vedurian happen to be highly irregular
and difficult. As for the easy bit: I made Tunu because I
wanted a private lang as free as possible from all the
hopeless exceptions, mindboggling rules and other
kimari-monku that I had to overcome in the natlangs I
learned. It's a private easiest lang to relax from the
foreign natlangs I have to use to make a living. But I know
that what's easy for me is hell for other people.

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One non-conlang-related reservation I have is that the
grammar page
renders (for me--I'm using the Opera beta for Mac OS X, I'll
have to check
it on some other browsers and Windows, etc.) with
forest-green headers and
some olive green text on a sky-blue background, which I find
slightly hard
on my eyes.  Perhaps changing it to dark blue like the rest
of the text
might make it easier to read.  Either that, or you might
consider changing
the background to white, which is (again) easier for most
people to read.
---------------------------------
But...but...but you're putting down the only creative touch
in my page! Boohoohoo!
I tried blue and green because my former white background
page looked so boring that I couldn't stand it anymore.
And also because some conlang pages I like (like Asiteya and
Verdurian) are blue or green.
But yeah, you're right.

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Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

Computer: a device designed to speed and automate errors.
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Mathias

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