I'm back, and I have questions....

I'm back in England after a sortie into foreign parts and have just trawled
through all 564 messages from the past fortnight. I wasn't going to reply to
any but the lively linguistic debate just sparked by creativity and I felt that
I should add something.

Well, to start with something small, on 12/02/00 Nik Taylor wrote:
> Probably.  I think I remember reading that some dialects of Irish use
> /v~/ for {mh}.
Purely out of interest, one of the most famous conlangs, Tolkien's Sindarin had this
sound in its early stages as lenition of [m].

In relation to the translation example I posted a while back, the Erce poem, I'm
thinking of giving it a whole page on my website in construction. If anyone
doesn't want their translation on it or if anyone wants to add anything, tell
me. I'm gratified by te response so far by the way, it makes me feel wanted :)

In response to the memorisation debate, I'd like to suggest my method. I've not
actually sat down and tried to memorise a list of words since my first year of
learning German. Try etymology. I remember the genders of most words in French,
which are always a pain by their cognates in Italian, Latin or Spanish
(resolving Latin's neuter is tricky), thus lune is f. because it is luna in
Italian. I also remember words as cognates to each other. When you speak a fair
few languages, they start to help each other out. Unfortunately, this only
works (for me) in the IE languages, and since all but one of my conlangs are
IE-derived I can remember words quite easily. Especially since I used an
etymological dictionary of English to find the IE roots, memory images of that
Dictionary help me enormously. Odd, but it works surprisingly well.

Daniel A. Weir's talk of coptic has me all interested now, what are you going to do
with it? Is there any thing we can see?

Dan

deivoi dentes edódent, deivoi dhonom dóbint