Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences

Mangiat scripsit:

> It's intriguing enough, anyway, that the Finnish word for 'father' comes from
> Gothic.
Really?  I know this is true for "mother":  Gothic aithei > Finnish a"iti.
(In Gothic spelling as in Greek, "ei" means /i:/.)

> 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.

> > Indeed, the only way, as far as I can see, that one can be completely
> > neutral is to take the a_priori approach.
>
> 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'.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter

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