Re: OT: Historical Linguistics Question

on 9/21/05 11:36 AM, R A Brown at ray@CAROLANDRAY.PLUS.COM wrote:

><...> Using previous
> Portuguese-Vietnamese dictionaries, he wrote a
> Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which was printed in Rome in
> 1651, using his spelling system.
>
> This BTW explains why the Vietnamese orthography is not a one-to-one
> phonemic mapping - it reflects the pronunciation of the language about 4
> centuries ago. Still not as bad as English or French whose orthographies
> reflect their languages as spoken some 7 or 8 centuries ago   ;-)

LMAO

Hehe, ... ::waves to all his colleagues & friends, esp'ly Komrade Yitzik &
Mr. Miller::
    yeah, I am still here on this here List - just havn't been "active"ly
Conlangin' as of this date...

    ... been too busy with writing for www.boheme-magazine.net (GO THERE &
HAVE FUN & SUPPORT IT if you can/wish) and RealLife caca (health and money,
as usual). My health is poor but stable and I am so poor that I am indebted
to the Poor Church Mice... otherwise I am ok.

--

Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger


     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...


"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

                "We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes,
                to find each other." - Jose Saramago

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