Re: Questions about Choton, was Re: [CONLANG] Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 19:35:38 EDT, Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:

>I hope no one objects if I hijack this German pronunciation thread to ask
>about Choton. :-)
Well, it was initially intended to be be a thread to talk about Choton,
before it turned into a thread about German pronunciation :D

> The web site says Choton is mainly based on English, German and Japanese.
>Is there a rule for which words will be drawn from which language
I had initially started with such rules (e.g. all question particles from
Japanese), but soon found it too constricting, so I abandoned them again.
There are just some practical approaches now, like trying to avoid words
that exist in two or more of the three, but mean completely different
things, e.g. as in:
"stern" means "star" in German, while in English it means "harsh, severe".
"demo" means "but" in Japanese, but is short for "demonstration" in English
and German.
Words that are the same (or very similar) in two languages are generally
preferred over less known words.

>or what the
>proportions should be?  Is the vocabulary intended to be about one-third from
>each?  (I can't tell, since I haven't spent much time with the vocabulary yet,
>I don't know German or Japanese, and in some cases it might be hard to tell
>whether a word comes from German or English.)
I try to keep the amounts balanced to equal amounts, but that is not an easy
thing to do, since for every word added from one language, you'd have to add
one word each from the other two.

>I note that the Choton name for Japan is "Japan," apparently drawn from the
>English (or German?) name.  I might have expected that each source language
>would contribute the name for its home country.
I first wanted to do it that way, but since "Japan" is used in English and
German and thus more known than "Nihon", I went for that... I might still
add "Nihon" as an alternative.

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of Choton
official Choton homepage:
http://www.choton.org

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