Re: Translation: Trolls and their Management

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Andreas Johansson <andjo@F...> wrote:
> > Quoting Tristan McLeay <zsau@F...>:
>
> > > BTW, do you mind me asking: You *are* aware that the e at the end of a
> > > word *can* be pronounced, don't you? For instance, it is in German.
> >
> > Since Mr Thalmann, if memory serves, is from the German-speaking bit of
> > Switzerland, I suspect he is aware.
>
> Yep...
I know, that's why I chose German :)

> in fact, I find it so natural to pronounce final e's
> that I abhor writing beautiful Quenya with drop-dead ugly
> tremata over those final e's.
Bah, tremata are so much better than umlauts. And they look good to. And
would be useful in the word 'creätion'.

> 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.

>  You can have final [e]
> though: it's spelled |ae| or |ei|.  So there.  =D
-ißde/-i(s)sede(/-i(s)sade etc.) would probably do it in Modern Føtisk
(but maybe not ... long vowels keep a-coming and a-going), and -øse should
suffice for final /wE/). Assuming all other things are being eaten, but I
can be very cruel to imaginary people.

--
Tristan

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