Re: Conlang Journal and being a fish

Thomas Leigh sikyal:

> Jesse Bangs a scris:
> > The young native speakers that I met while I was there
>
> You've been there? You lucky stiff!
:-D.  I'm trying to figure out when I can go back, too . . .

> > actually perceived
> > a different rule: |î| at the beginning of words, and |â| elsewhere.
> > Also, they spell "to laugh" as |râde|, even
> > though it's from *ride.
>
> I think you must be right. I was sure I'd read somewhere that the
> spelling reform was based on etymological priniciples, but when I looked
> at my textbook it agrees with you: "â was reintroduced in 1993 when the
> Romanian Academy resolved that â should replace î in most words... At
> the beginning of a word, though, and in compound words formed with în, î
> remains."
Ah, so that *is* the rule. Nice. The only thing I was never clear on were
the verbs ending in [i-]. I seem to recall that they also kept the |î|
where applicable, but I'm not sure.

> > They
> > all agreed that the slang contraction pronounced [1s] (from "sunt")
> should
> > be spelled |îs|, although it doesn't exist in the standard language
> and so
> > has no "official" spelling.
>
> Wow... I didn't even know that existed! I suppose that's the sort of
> thing you have to actually go there to find out about, though...
Yeah, since it's pretty heavily discouraged in the standard language. It
was one of the harder things to figure out from speech, to, although once
I got it I realized there's a neat symmetry between the contracte forms of
"este" and "sunt":

este > e > -i
sunt > îs > -s

E.g.
"Este un tren pe aici? Nu, e pe acolo. Si unde-i bancul?"
"Sunt bãieti frumosi aici? Nu, îs urâti. Si-s fetele frumoase?"

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"What are you, a dentist? Or a hippie?
Or some kind of hippie dentist?"
--Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner)