Re: Translation: Trolls and their Management

Quoting Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>:

> On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> > For the record, Obrenje's final e's are not mute by default.
> > Witness: |tane| [ta:n] < *[ta:.n=], |tanne| [tann@], |tate|
> > [ta:t_h] < *[ta:.t@_0].  As for Jovian, final |e| is indeed
> > silent, but so are final |a| and |u|.
>
> Is this a competition? I'm not entirely which final letters (and
> combinations thereof) are silent in Føtisk, but you can be sure it won't
> just be three :) (On the other hand, I should probably just stick it to
> English and declare that final |e| is not silent for reasons I'm not yet
> sure of.
If you discount Tairezazh sandhi, which can cause just about any final
consonant to go silent (eg, _zdak krazan_ ['zda krazan] "government,
cabinet"), none of my conlangs' orthographies include silent finals.

However, besides having plenty of silent medial 'e's, Steienzh orthography
would clearly be improved if some silent finals were added, namely in the case
of the multitudes and hordes of nouns whose stems end in consonant clusters
that are simplified in the unmarked nom sg (often also in the acc sg, the
ending -s wrecking havoc), but retained before (other) endings. Since the
simplifications are perfectly predictible, maintaining the same spelling of
the same phoneme everywhere surely is a greater good than absolute
phoneticity. Esp given that the orthography includes a variety of
etymologizing spellings wrt to other mergers and neutralizations.

                                          Andreas