Trademarks

On Thursday, December 6, 2001, at 01:44 , Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote:
>
>> <laugh>  Hey, at least you *have* a trademark.  I think my only
>> trademarks
>> are general disorganization, a fondness so far for 3's, and
>> dull-as-dust phonologies
>
> Well, I also don't much of a trademark except front rounded vowels,
> which I have in Germanech and Nur-ellen, and plan to have in the
> protolanguage and the sister languages of Nur-ellen as well,
> simply because I *love* them.  As long as I have been fiddling
> with languages, I always found languages with only /a e i o u/
> and no /"o y/ lacking something.  They are my favourite phonemes!
> (I recently also developed a taste for voiceless liquids like those
> of Welsh and Brithenig, though.)  Another trademark is that I spell
> /j/ as <j>; <y> is /y/ to me, and nothing else.
>
:-)  I'm quite fond of /"o/ too, though it took me years to be able to
produce it (I approximated using /e/ or /ej/ like any other stoopid
American <sigh>).  I would love to *hear* what Welsh sounds like.  Years
of reading fantasy with Welsh names and unhelpful appendices with equally
unhelpful pronunciation guides have left me rather frustrated...someday I
mean to collect lots and *lots* of language tapes.  <G>

>> (I am loath to include anything I can't yet pronounce reliably).
>
> Well, I also tend not to design anything I can't pronounce;
> however, I have trained my tongue a bit and can pronounce quite much
> stuff which is not in any natlang I have yet learned.
>
You are more fortunate than I.  :-p  I figure that as long as I can't
reliably pronounce the !@#$ alveolar trill I'm going to be hopeless at
everything else...<sigh>  Maybe in another 10 years I'll have some sort of
handle on it.  Dammit, my tongue isn't that flexible...the vowels aren't
too hard to pick up, but the consonants...that and the fact that while I
love speaking German, it gives me a sore throat very rapidly.

> And yes, I am also quite horribly disorganized, and much of my conlang
> stuff only exists in my head, no written notes, no computer files.
<admiration>  You must have an excellent memory.  If I didn't write down
my conlangs, they would shortly cease to exist, and I'm too fundamentally
lazy to try to reconstruct 'em from scratch every time.  With my memory I'
m not sure how I managed to learn *English,* let alone anything else...

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

Replace me with a computer?  Why?  It wouldn't work either!