Re: Language of Tetril

On Sunday, December 9, 2001, at 10:50 , Almaran Dungeonmaster wrote:

> I have been reading and posting on this list for a while, but I have never
> really posted anything about any of my conlangs. As a matter of fact, I am
> more of a conculturalist than a conlanger per se, so my need to create
> languages comes forth from adding flavor and consistency to my world.
>
I believe someone's mentioned the conculture list (you can find it on
YahooGroups somewhere), but I fall into the conculturalist camp of
conlangers as well.  :-)  You're not alone.

> The sound produced by a waterbowl is determined by the type of bowl used,
> the amount of water in it and the way in which the bowl is struck. Expert
> priests can read the meaning of the waterbowl by watching the shape and
> pattern of the waves in the bowl. Since all the sounds are sonorants, most
> of the phonemic inventory of the language of these elves, in an attempt to
> mimic the sounds of the waterbowl, consists of vowels and semi-vowels,
> and a
> few non-obstruent consonants. Most sounds are nasalized, mimicking the
> sounds of the ringing metal bowls.
>
Wow...I would love to hear sound-samples of both these bowls and the
language.

> The elven script features all kinds of wave-shaped symbols, which when
> spun
> together form wavy lines that are hard to read for outsiders. An example
> of
> the writing can be found in a PDF file at this location:
>
> http://www.almaran.net/world/language/scriptexample.pdf
It's quite lovely.  :-)  If I attempted to write it, it would also be
quite illegible, I'm afraid.  Are their scribes specially trained to
produce unambiguous letter-forms (or are ambiguous letter-forms encouraged
to make things harder for outsiders)?

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

I used to think PCs were the greatest things since sliced bread...then
someone showed me sliced bread.

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