Re: "art", "Art" & anti-Art (was Re: conlangs as art (was: Re: Wikipedia:Verifiability - Mailing lists as sources

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 6:50 AM, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:

> >(and grammar/phonology?  Not sure what would
>  >make a dadaïste phonology.  Maybe a phoneme
...

>  Yes, dadaist phonology might be difficult to distinguish from "kitchensinky"
>  or "alien". Stuff like phonemic /spl/ but no phonemic /p/ could make it.
>  Maybe require consonants &vowels to always come in clusters of 2N? Let's try
>  this...
>
>  /sp bl st rl sk gl/ <p b t d k g>
>  /mf xt Nf Nm Xf/ <m s f n h>
>  /pj pw tH kj kw/ <z v x c q>
>  /qK @u gZ lX/ <l r j w>
>  /ae eu i2 oy ui @a/ <y o e u i a>
>
>  <example>
>  /i2.'tH@amf.spqKi2/
>  <another>
>  /@aNmeustXfi2@u/
>  <zomg wut>
>  /pjeumfgl lXoyst/
I tried out something like that last night -- a phoneme inventory
of /q' t' ? c B j\ M\  y 2 &~ 1 M 7/, and consonants are required
to always occur in clusters.  But I gave up on it pretty soon;
it seems to me a dadalang phonology should be exotic and
absurd but still reasably euphonious, if we're going to write
Dada poetry in it.  It should enable poetry as silly and as
beautiful as the "Chanson Dada".

So my second draft phonology/orthography would look more like this:

/? t_w c B T j\ M\  y 2 & 1 M 7/
<' t   c v z j  w   y e a i u o>

with (C)V(C) syllables and some restrictions on medial clusters
(not sure what yet).

izo  - Dada
e - first person pronoun; third person beloved pronoun
o - second person pronoun; third person ambivalent pronoun
a'a - third person despised pronoun
'yta - wildebeest; a nagging suspicion that one has forgotten something
uvci - lungs; sense of Dada
cavze - nose; thumb; another part which we perhaps should gloss
            in the decent obscurity of a learned language, if at all
tyvu - to seek; to lose
zua  - song, poem, nervously muttered explanation of why one's
        homework is late; to sing, write a poem, mutter a nervous
explanation etc.
wyzoji - the kind of word which would probably occur less than once
      in a million-word corpus, but which one includes in one's conlang
      in order to demonstrate one's erudition
o'iv - a house which has been abandoned, vandalized, cleaned up and
      reinhabited by a commune of Dadaist conlangers, repossessed
      by a bank which shortly afterward went bankrupt, and abandoned
      again, a cubic number of times
eti - temporary exhaustion with lexicon-making

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry