Re: TROLLS!!

A pre-script note: I make it a strict policy for myself not to get involved in
"chats" on high-traffic lists like CONLANG unless I'm actually discussing a
conlang, preferably introducing something new in my own. Since there has been a
problem with off-topic posts (but bear in mind this list is meant to be open
forum and we don't want no stinkin' "list nazis"), I don't like to post even
"friendly" posts. So if I come across as snobby or ignoring people, my
apologies. I'm not good at small talk anyway.

We just need to police ourselves a little better, but God forbid we end up being
afraid of the evil censor. I post regularly to a mental health-related message
board, and all a sudden the vice-admin is going crazy with removing posts. And
it's scaring me, because we're used to being open to the point of being possibly
somewhat offensive to some, but that's part of our therapy -- not taking things
so personally. At least for me.

Now back to our regular program already in progress.

From: "Neo" <NeoVirus@...>

| Danny:
|
|         If what you say is true (5 minute conlang) then you have skills
| in my book! I like the number system, very easy to learn, makes sense. I
| also like how you added the dialect idea (for aesthetics. Hehe). If I
| wasn't real busy, I would critique some more, but until then, I think
| it's a good idea for the proposed time spent on making it ;).

Thanks for your comments, the number system is not much different than what
you'd see in Chinese or Japanese. It's much more efficient since it expresses
numbers more scientificially, saying "three hundred six ten four" instead of
"three hundred sixty-four" or "three hundred threescore four".

A new number I didn't mention in the original post, MILIYATU "myriad", means
"ten thousand", so the number 54,823 is SINKO MILIYATU KATA MILI ETE SENTO TU
TISI TILI.

The "dialect idea" is a feature I call "loose phonemic association" or other
names, where in languages with small inventories like LANKA, you have multiple
legal values for a phoneme. Like when I say S, it could be an affricate or a
fricative, and either alveolar, postalveolar or even retroflex. Also, and I
didn't say this in my earlier post, the vowels O and U seem to be merging,
producing a four vowel phonemic set. Some are even going so far as to
eliminating U as a vowel and writing all back rounded vowels as O, and using V
instead of W for the labiovelar semivowel. So where one troll may write
WASINTONU for Washington, another may write VASINTONO. Also, the aforementioned
MILIYATU can appear as MILIYATO, and both are equally valid.

There doesn't seem to be any efforts to unite E with either A or I -- yet.

I also didn't mention the legal diphthongs, and there are only three: AI AU OI.
Trolls don't like [eu] very much so they say/write YU or U instead. Also, Y can
only appear before the back vowels A U O. W can appear before any vowel except
U.

And now I'm breaking another one of my own etiquettes: I *hate* long posts; I
get lost in them too easily. I have just one more thing to mention, then I'll
close this thing out.

In the earlier post I described the use of "of" to express ordinals and
fractions, and I just realized that would be a "partitive" construction. I
almost decided not to make any distinction between cardinal and ordinal numbers.
But then I realized that there might be a need to say "third mountain" instead
of "three mountain" (again, LANKA has no marked plural; you use the preposition
PULU, from French _plus_ instead). So I thought of the notion of "the third of a
group of mountains", just as I thought of "two of three" for the fraction 2/3.
Hence the partitive syntax of TE TILI -- "of three", _de trois_.

(Another thing: some say TUWA instead of TILI for "three", and I might go with
the French variant anyway.)

~Danny~

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