Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, John Cowan wrote:

> Mangiat scripsit:
>
> > 2_ It has a difficult phonology (yessirs, and here's why): [...]
> > It has vowel harmony.
>
> I grant your other points, but why should vowel harmony make things more
> difficult?  I was using it just the other day, in a Turkish restaurant,
> to reconstruct which items on the menu were spelled with "i" and which
> with "dotless-i": the printer obviously used a Latin-1 font that
> had u" and o" but no dotless-i.  If anything, I should think
> vowel harmony would tend to make things easier, not harder.
<nodnodnod>  I was reading _On the Trail of the Women Warriors_ today,
and there are chapters where the author speaks of her travels/research in
Turkey, and I was doing the same thing with dotless-i and dotted-i.  I
confess the Turkish endings still give me trouble, but I haven't had much
time studying the grammar I have, and mainly it's associating the four
variants of endings that my brain still boggles on (rather than the
inflections that have only two variants, and apologies if I'm getting
this badly wrong).

> > Which, anyway, using a vocabulary based on made up roots no language uses,
> > would turn back as a boomerang.
>
> There is a third way: the Loglan "Chicken McNuggets" words, which are designed
> to resemble, without actually being the same as, words from various
> (numerically) great world languages.  Thus, *mrenu* 'human being' is designed
> to suggest both English 'man' and Chinese 'ren2'.
<laugh>  I like the idea.

YHL

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