maggelity and Etabnannery

I want to know more about Etabnannery.  I gather, from your brief
discussion, that Etabnannery is a way of spelling that is phonetic, but
which uses the Roman alphabet in unusual ways.  To that degree, then,
Teonaht has some etabnannery to it, yet it remains phonetic:

        ht =/T/
        hd=/D/
        hs=/S/
        hl=/however the lateral fricative is characterized/
        u=/j/
        c=/tS/
        o=/u/  (I had to change this rule on my Web site, because the proper
character for /o/ was "o" with a macron
            over it.  Since this character was more common, and because html
doesn't have a macron, I had to make
            my beloved plain "o" /u/ into a character with a tilde over it,
leaving long "o" with no marking.  In email
            messages, there is no distinction.  You just have to know when o
is /u/ or /o/.)
        y=/i/

Not to mention its peculiar use of doubling consonants to indicate
irregularity of stress.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."



> > When I listen to singer Iva Bittova's Czech, and see it printed in her
> > CD
> > booklet, I'm amazed at how different it sounds from its graphic
> > representation, and I almost always lament that Teonaht is so damned
> > phonetic.
>
> Well, so far as I've seen Czech, it looks pretty damn phonetic to me ;)))
.
> It's just that it follows unusual rules.
I answered this in another post.  I mispoke.

> This is not exactly Maggelity (a
> better word for that phenomenon is Etabnannery, see
>
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0207B&L=conlang&P=R13711
),
> but pretty damn close, and although the word Maggelity seems to have
stuck,
> Etabnannery did not :(( .
>
>   Interestingly, Christoph has taken his Maggel from his
> > excursion
> > to Ireland and Irish Gaelic, which has one of the most fiendishly
> > difficult
> > writing systems, worse even than French or English, due to a paucity
> > of
> > characters that can signify Gaelic "broad" and "slender" consonants.
>
> I agree! Although the solution used (having the broadness or slenderness
of
> consonants marked through the vowels which touch them) is very neat, it is
so
> impossible to remember which vowel is silent and is there only to indicate
the
> broadness or slenderness of a consonant, and which one is actually
> pronounced! :))
Exactly my problem.

> > Old
> > Irish is even harder, since so much of it does not reveal mutation
> > (Welsh is
> > so much easier!).  Maggelity is that aspect of a language that makes
> > you
> > throw your hands up in despair at learning it.
>
> Exactly!!! That's one of the best definition I've seen of Maggelity :))) .
Yry myeebihs!

>   German maggelity will be
> > its
> > insane system of gender (at least used in Twain's day, who wrote the
> > hilariously funny "That Awful German Language"):  a fishwife is neuter,
> > but
> > a female cat is masculine and has to be referred to as "he" etc.
>
> Really?! Maggel has also this feature of pure grammatical agreement, even
in
> the use of pronouns, but I thought no natlang had that! Do you mean that
to
> refer to a fishwife, Germans will use the pronoun "es"?!! In Dutch, "girl"
is
> neuter ("*het* meisje"), but AFAIK they still refer to girls as "zij":
she, the
> biological gender being more important than the grammatical gender. I
thought
> Maggel was exceptional in considering the grammatical gender more
important
> than the biological gender, even when talking about people!
Twain complained about hoch Deutsch in the mid-nineteenth century.  I
imagine that dialectical and even formal German has relaxed its rules about
grammatical and natural gender today, although when I asked one of my German
colleagues, he said that in some places, formal German still insists on the
rule.  "The maiden entered the room; it sat down on the sofa."  You look as
though you are referring to a dialect above.  Twain's essay is uproarious.
He does a whole schtick on "The Fishwife." and peppers it with pronouns that
make the story completely incomprehensible!

> > have
> > often lamented that Teonaht, while exhibiting some maggelity, ought to
> > have
> > more of it.  I'm tentatively working on contemporary colloquial Teonaht
> > that
> > will omit many sounds that are still retained in the orthography, so
> > that
> > "Kwa hdar tobre" ("what?" /kwa Dar 'tobre/ is pronounced "kwa'r tobre,"
> > or
> > even "kwar torb"; a hard thing to do to my beloved lingua.
>
> I'd call that the "Quenya" effect, the difficulty for people to let their
> language be other than pure and beautiful :) .
Oh, Teonaht is not pure and beautiful, by all means.  It has a bunch of ugly
words in it, like gnadol for "meat," and mongwyf for "language system," and
krefimort for "horrendous and socially disabling slip of the tongue" and
krekinvand for "nightmare" and farlarop for both "hurled object" and "the
person who gets hit by a hurled object"; and it hasn't been pure and regular
for decades.   :)   It's just that it's hard to change the pronunciation or
to minimalize it in a dialectical form--for fear that this might replace it!
I'm very fond of it, wordy as it is.

>   This is
> > called
> > Menarilihs, but it's not systematized yet.  As for the "maggelity" of
> > Teonaht, this extends mainly to introducing Nendeylyt noun systems and
> > irregularities into its vocabulary (something I did about twenty years
> > ago),
> > wherein some nouns take case mutations but the rest not; introducing the
> > Law
> > of Detachability; making plurals manifold and both prefixual and
> > suffixual
> > and dependent on prosody; having more words with multiple and maybe
> > even
> > contradictory meanings.  Is that what you meant, Christoph and Jan?
> >
>
> Yep! This looks to me like Maggelity all right. An important part of
Maggelity
> is that patterns must be minimal. If everything, as strange as you want,
falls
> into a handful of patterns, this is no Maggelity by Etabnannery :)) .
Then T. might be more Etabnannerihs than maggelihs. :)  It does have
patterns of regularity. (These would be pronounced: /etabn^'nErIS/ and
/ma'gElIS/)

> > If so, you can see that I really like "maggelity," and prefer it to
> > regularity in a Conlang.  But I don't want to take it too far; it's
> > important that those who have any interest in Teonaht should be able
> > to
> > learn some of it!
> >
>
> Hehe, I admit this doesn't bother me at all with Maggel ;))) . Although I
still
> think that people can learn a bit of it. They will just have the tendency
to
> overregularise things :)) .
True.

> > Somebody somewhere told me that there is a test one can put one's
> > conlang
> > to, whereby it can be discovered whether it is naturalistic or false.
> > Was
> > this person bluffing me?  I'd be very interested in such a thing, since
> > I'm
> > writing a story about a "discovered" but possibly invented language.
> >
>
> I'm interested too. Someone else knows about that?
I repeat my question, then!

> Christophe.
I'm misspelling your name, I see!  Eftoihs!


Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

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