Re: Conlang T-shirt, was: Re: London Boink: minutes (fwd)

On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Doug Ball wrote:

> 1) If anyone knows, what type of language change (reconstructed, of course)
> has gone on in Austronesian languages over the past five hundred years?
> (Reason:  Many characteristics in my language are similar to Austronesian
> langs and in my language's history writing was introducing about five
> hundred years before "the present")
I don't exactly know - there isn't much hard data on 500-years old
Austronesian, so you'd have to look at reconstructions anyway. You
should be able to find lots in any decent library.

> 2) Any ideas on whether peoples without the benefit of "consonantal"
> languages like the Semitic langs would ever invent alphabets?
I doubt it, especially since none of the other nat-scripts is
alphabetic.

> 3) Would people use a syllabary with a language that has many consonant
> clusters?
>
No, they'd probably start out with a character-like script, like
Chinese. Old (and Middle) Chinese appear to have been full of
consonant clusters, especially syllable initial. So if you've
got a language with words like bsgribs, I'd go for characters.



Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt