Re: Conlang name in spam subject? "burzeon staoch"

Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:

> Hi all!
>
> The other day  I got a spam with the subject line
> "burzeon staoch" I thought this would be an excellent
> name of a conlang, or a phrase for something in a
> conlang (presumably 'big c*ck', wrt the spam context.)
>
> Come to think of it it looks like Maghean,
> save for the _z_!
The style is indeed reminicent of Meghean's.

But there's a couple more problems than that "z"; no Meghean word begins with
_st-_* and _ao_ should, in the regularized spelling I'm employing, only be
found world-finally.

That said, _z_ and _ao_ might be the product of a particularly ideosynchratic
scribe ("z" presumably represents a glyph not found in the eighteen-letter
Meghean alphabet), and _staoch_ could be a "funky loan that breaks the rules"
(to borrown a phrase from John Cowan) - it does look vaguely like the perfect
from of a verb.

But more likely it's the result of said scribe trying to transcribe a foreign
phrase. The pronouncing he or she was aiming for was then most likely
something like [burZon stawx] (I'm assuming whoever chose 'z' for
transliterating the unknown glyph knew what he/she was doing!). What language
might that then be? It's obviously not Yargish**. Doesn't look much Larethian
either. Presumeably it's from some human or dwarvish language.

* Old Larethian st- got borrowed as simply t- into 'middle' Meghean - likely
the same thing is true of more recent loans.

** If that doesn't seem obvious to you, recall that Yargish does not have
bilabials.

                                                          Andreas

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