Re: The difficulties of being more regular than Teonaht

En réponse à Sally Caves :

> >
> > Nice! Any plan to bring him up here? ;)
>
>Yeah, if I could find his email address that I wrote down somewhere. :)
LOL, I know the trouble ;) .

> >
> > Nice! I wonder how a Teonaht speaker would view the concept of
> > philosophical language, what categories he would make, what grammatical
> > features he would deem necessary or not, etc... :))
>
>His name is Ardran Tisekify /'ardr@n tI'sEkfi/ and has been exposed (when
>Teonhea "emerges") to early eighteenth-century European language studies.
Ouch! This can distord a person's mind for good! ;))

>  He
>finds the Teonaht language to be overly polysyllabic and irregular, so he
>has reduced all words to a single set of syllables that include a vowel and
>two consonants.  He is fixated, of course, on "threeness" (as so many Teonim
>are), but reluctant to copy the Semitic tripartite consonantal system (which
>of course he admires).  He is working, currently, on perfect and imperfect
>word groups.  He has reduced the vowel system to five perfect vowels, y, e,
>a, o, u, with imperfect vowel schwa (i).
>
>     syt, tys, yst, tsy, sty, yts
>     set, tes, est, tse, ste, ets
>     sat, tas, ast, tsa, sta, ats
>     sot, tos, ost, tso, sto, ots
>     sut, tus, ust, tsu, stu, uts
>
>This is a perfect syllable group because the combination of "s" and "t" can
>be reversed without harming ease of articulation, thus producing a wide
>number of words with related meanings.
Interesting system. IIRC we were talking not too long ago about grammatical 
functions showed by changing the order of phonemes. You may want to look at 
the archives...


>Similarly:  pyf, fyp, yfp, pfy, fpy, ypf.  etc.  And of higher status than
>syt, etc., because labial.
Our Ardran finds the lips superior to the tongue?

>But there are groups of syllables that are "imperfect" because their
>consonants cannot be reversed in all cases:
>
>     lyr, ryl ylr (bad-- requires a schwa between "l" and "r" or afterwards),
>lry, rly (bad), yrl.
>
>  They require a schwa, which disrupts the "threeness" of the word: ylr=ylir
>or ylri; rily
>
>Even worse is "m" and "p":
>
>     myt, tym, ymt, tmy, mty (bad), ytm (bad).
Hehe, Arabic (with words like "ibn") would disagree, as I do ;)) . But I 
see the point :) .

>Now some Teonim argue that rl is a viable initial consonant cluster distinct
>from lr, but T'sekify objects.  There are some Teonaht linguists who declare
>that consonant clusters are viable or not according to cultural acceptance,
>and that this is a weak system to begin with, and boringly regular and ugly
>and confusing to boot, but Tisekify insists that the best combinations are
>stops and fricatives; that stops and stops rarely produce ease of
>articulation in all combinations.   What he intends to do with these groups
>is to apply levels of status to each phoneme (how close to or far away from
>the divine it is depending on its position in the mouth--labials are closer
>to God than velars, which are closer to the stomach)
I now have the answer to my question. Strange ideas...

>  and consonant clusters
>themselves will have similar status.  And then to assign status and general
>meaning to syllable groups.  And within that syllable group, to decide which
>combinations make nouns, verbs, modifiers, and determiners. And then what
>related concepts are introduced by changing the vowels.  He will probably
>revise the system of volitionality present in Teonaht, but eliminate gender,
>making distinctions that were earlier made between animate, inanimate, and
>deific.  That's as far as he's gotten.  He will toil at this, like John
>Wilkins, for most of his life (he hasn't developed a taxonomy of universals,
>yet), but to his horror the language will be given to the mechanical
>servants of Rrordaly (because of the ersatz logic of the system and its
>distinctions between animacy and inanimacy and between the perfect and the
>imperfect); these are the arch enemy of Teonhea, who will distort it,
>introducing rich weirdnesses that Tisekify never intended.  He will go quite
>mad.
That was fated as soon as he listened to eighteenth century's linguists ;)) .

>This, of course, is a project I have no intention of pursuing in any detail,
>but I thought it funny!!!
It would make a very interesting story for sure, and a nice critique of the 
Universal Language movement of the 18th century ;))) .

>I'm also working on a longish story (that I wrote when I was a kid) about a
>Teonaht werewolf.
Interesting. I wonder if the fascination the Teonim have for cats will have 
any influence on their behaviour with someone who transforms into something 
related to dogs ;)) .

>   I'm getting more and more interested in web publishing
>and hyper- and intertexts, which work well for my on-line conlang stuff.   I
>don't know when I'll have time for any of this, but it excites me. :)  I'm
>thinking of getting a domain name and a site.  Any suggestions? :)
What would be the main theme of such a site? Or would it be general?


>Off and on, Christophe.  I love this group, but it can be obsessive for me,
>and I have to bide my time.
I know the problem. However, we know have a new limit, which is a personal 
limit of 5 posts a day to the list for everyone. This has helped a lot in 
reducing the traffic here. It's still heavy, but not overwhelming anymore, 
at least in my opinion.

Anyway, please stay as long as possible, I rejoice in having you 
participate again :) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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