Re: My crazy conlang
From: | Ph. D. <phild@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, January 7, 2004, 22:58 |
Some years ago, a friend of mine wrote and printed a
small booklet as a joke. It was supposedly a translation
of some ancient writings from Anatolia, called the EZ-AHA.
I liked it so much that I asked him if I could translate it into
Esperanto and publish a bilingual edition. He said sure.
However, I really wanted to print a trilingual edition. I
wanted to add the original "Anatolian" text. I was planning
to print this booklet via letterpress. I have a couple of
machines for casting handset type, so I selected an 18 pt.
sans serif font. I cast several capital letters centered on
a 14 pt. body so I could flip them over. I also cast some
letters with parts hanging off the body, then I sawed them
off.
Now that I had an alphabet, I assigned sound values to
the symbols. I used inferior and superior symbols for the
vowels. I wanted the page to have a realistic distribution
of the letters, so I loosely translated the text into my new
script by looking up Slavic root words for the nouns and
verbs, then applying Latinate inflections. No prepositions
were used.
I then transliterated this into my new alphabet and handset
the type. The result is a fifty-page book. Sample pages
are here:
http://marlboromats.com/shaw/Ezaha1a.jpg
http://marlboromats.com/shaw/Ezaha2.jpg
--Ph. D.