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Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Sunday, April 1, 2001, 17:46
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

Replies

Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Mangiat <mangiat@...>R: Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences