Re: Conlang in-jokes.

Hmm... this subject reminds me of the following "fact" (mentioned by Douglas
Adams in his sci-fi novel "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe",
should someone not know):

"It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much
importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the
Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called
jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a
thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks
themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian "chinanto/mnigs"
which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the
Gagrakackan "tzjin-anthony-ks" which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in
fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the
names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the
worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds."

"What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any
theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and
yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young
structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply
excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very
close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old
structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young
ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline,
and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their
problems in Ouisghian Zodahs."

---

Me, I decided rather early on that I'll have one of these. Tho my current
version of the name /'qE.N@N.tOn IG/ is not quite along the formula, which
according to this sample appears to be:
<coronal affricate + high front vowel + coronal nasal (+ non-high non-front
vowel) + coronal nasal + some other coronal sound + non-high non-front vowel
+ nasal + high front vowel + velar plosive + coronal fricative> (I'm
assuming that the names mentioned are anglicized.)
/N/ and /G/ (actually [M\_r_-]) are IMO feasible generalizations, but /qE/
might be a little too much... I however haven't reverse-engineered an
internal etymology for the name yet.

And the obvious question: has anyone else done this? :)

John Vertical

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