Re: Umlaut (was: More questions)

Paul Bennett wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:19:13 +0000, Stephen Mulraney
> <ataltanie@...> wrote:
>
>> Paul Bennett wrote:
>>
>>> My still unnamed project (provisionally WC8, de facto, it seems) has
>>> vowel
>>
>>
>> I must say, every time I see the name _WC8_, I think you're trying to
>> outdo my _ML4_ :)  (also unnamed, also making excessive [ab]use of unicode)
>>
>
> Well, it's a complex nominegenesis, to be honest. Well, not complex, but
> somewhat long.
...

> WC8. All of the WCx projects started (and mainly ended) life as collections
> of phonemes, and romanisation schemes (WC6a was a cyrillicisation scheme),
> all inspired largely by discussions on this list.
Interesting. Well, my ML4 is the in a series of languages projects, which, like
yours, were not all actually languages. PL ('protolang') was a collection of
semetic-style roots with a far too many phonemes (it looks very immature and
all-inclusive to me now), ML ('modern lang'), aka Uteghuiil actually had a
grammar, but one I soon tired of (tendency to monstrous verbs), ML2 aka Tetelgen
has a grammar, and is somewhat pleasing to me. ML3 and ML3a (Ligutniisat) are
again collections of roots, with unreasonable collections of phonemes (doubly
articuled velar/labio*dental* nasals?!), and what grammar exists is too complicated
to remember, never mind use. And then we have ML4, which might properly be called
ML8 or ML4i or something. The building and tearing has been going on since February
or so.

Anyway, I was struck not so much by the _8_ in _WC8_, but the fact that it seemed
to suggest that you had a manner of working much like my own.


> WC8 is the most electic collection of phonemes I've put together, except
> for two aborted projects, mQlò and the language which bore the name
> Thagojian at the time (what you see me posting recently is more properly
> Thagojian C). mQlò contisted of clicks, lateralisation of clicks,
> prenasalisation of clicks (two kinds), four vowels, phonemic nasalisation
> and phonemic tone. The original Thagojian had 224 (or 244? I forget)
> consonantal phonemes (including valid homorganic consonant sequences) and
> two vowels. Both were a priori.
ha! My langs have become phonemically *less* eclectic, but hopefully more
interesting sounding. In other words, I've been sacrificing unnessecarily
complicated phonologies in an attempt to make something more manageable, and
to force myself to work more creatively with a smaller pallette. It's getting
there, but it's slow work.

To be honest, the main reason for my slowness is my 'algorithmic' approach to
creativity: rather than coming up with something "in my head", I tend to proof
vast amounts of either randomly-generated material (or more commonly) material
that's been evolved from one of my earlier langs via a soundchange program.
So if my early phonologies were naive, I hope to introduce some flavoursome
bias by a sort of an aesthetic Darwinism :)


> My other main project, Meinian, was ad-hoc semi-postiori, vowel-rich and
> fairly boring. It was actually the source of some of my most substantial
> and complete translation excersizes (since vocab items were more or less
> made up on the spot and there were very few derivational operations), but
> I've lost my notes over the course of several PC moves and rebuilds.
I've managed to avoid such boringness, I think. I once designed a fairly lame
phonology for an auxlang-*style*  thing called SL0. This mainly consisted of
an IPA chart with regions coloured in to indicate what phoneme they belonged to.
Gah.


--
Stephen Mulraney        ataltane@ataltane.net        http://ataltane.net
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.