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

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

> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 15:53:22 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> [snip]
>
> > 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] --
>
> Hm, perhaps a misspelling for _burgheon stouch_ or _...stooch?
The proper way to spell [burZon staux] in Meghean would be _burgheon stauch_.
It's indeed a good question why the scribe did not employ the "ghe" trigraph
if [Z] was the intended sound, but assuming the translit with "z" makes any
sense I'm hard pressed to think what else could be intended. Well, the
transliterator might be German, and think z=[ts], but then we'd expect to _ze_
to spell [tS], which normal Meghean orthography already provides _two_
spellings for;  _te_ and _ce_. Might [burzjon] actually be intended, the
foreign glyph indicating that postalveolarization should not occur? That
sounds still less than anything I recognize ...

                                                     Andreas

PS **_Stooch_ would be as odd as **_staoch_ - diphthongs in [-w] are only
written with -o when the second part derives from the accusative ending, which
after consonants is [-o], and thus only occur word-finally.

PPS Back on the German tangent, [burtsjon] looks vaguely like a German
pronunciation of a Latinate -tion word; some German accent and it sounds
almost plausible: [bUR'tsjo:n]. _Staoch_ is less than entirely disimilar to
German _stauchen_ ['Staoxn=], a verb meaning to collide violently with smth,
and by extension also to violently insult someone. One could spin quite an
interdimensional spun thing of this ...