Re: Ethnologue

On Thu, Aug 31, 2000 at 01:50:47PM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> Lassailly@AOL.COM wrote:
>
> > tunu means "language", juni "people" and nola-nola means
> > "group of islands". another sudden, unbridled burst of
> > imagination of mine. all this is a micro(wave) nation-- of course.
>
> Actually, there are lots of languages where the word for the language
> means "speech" and that for the people who speak it "people".  When
> English speakers learned about a group of people from their traditional
> enemies, the name we use often means "enemy"; e.g. Sioux IIRC.
[snip]

Awesome. This is exactly what I'm doing with my conlang: the people who
speak the language are called the "Ebisedi", from "3bis33'di", the epicene
plural locative of a word meaning "person". I haven't coined a name for
the language yet, but it will be along similar lines.

An interesting issue with this method is, how do you form singulars and/or
masculine/feminine forms when you refer to the people? I personally insist
on using "Bisedi" as the singular of "Ebisedi" because "bis33'di" is the
proper epicene singular locative form of "3bis33'di". But this gets
awfully messy and confusing once you start getting into masculine/feminine
forms, esp. in my conlang, where vowel and consonant gradation completely
(well, to a non-native) changes the word:
        masc. singular loc.: pii'z3di   -->     Pizedi ?
        masc. plural loc.: 3pii'z3di    -->     Epizedi ?
        fem. sing. loc.:  biz3tai'      -->     Bizetai ?
        fem. plural loc.: 3biz3tai'     -->     Ebizetai ?

I can see how this will cause endless headaches and pain when we talk
about these people in English, since *nobody* will remember what those
forms are if they haven't learned the conlang. Besides, the Anglicizations
above will probably sound totally weird when pronounced, anyway, because
the pitch accent isn't preserved, so it would sound odd to a Bisedi
(singular of Ebisedi, remember! :-P ), and it certainly doesn't sound like
English words.

OTOH, referring to a female speaker of my conlang as a "lady Bisedi"
sounds really out-of-place... :-(

Advice?


T