CONLANG Digest - 5 Dec 2000 to 6 Dec 2000 (#2000-334)

> From:    John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> Subject: Re: A funny linguistic subway experience + some questions about
>
> Raymond Brown wrote:
>
> >                                    ___
> > On the other hand, the odd letter | | | used by some of the Asiatic
> >                                     |
> > Ionians may well have represented some palatal sound similar to [tS].
And
> > who know what zeta variously represented in all the early dialects?
>
> Interesting!  Ought I to propose this letter to the Unicode people for
> inclusion?  (The process takes real time, so if it makes sense to encode
> it, then starting now is reasonable.)
Is that letter supposed to be _san_ (like a sideways sigma, later _sampi_)?
Or is it something else entirely?

> From:    Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
> Subject: Re: Translation question
>
> The cognomen, apparently, was given in pretty much the same way we get
> nicknames.  I might be called "Ratface" because of my goatee (actually, in
> an attempt to assign myself a cognomen, I searched high and low for a
> Latin word for "rat," but sadly couldn't find one except in Medieval
> Latin).
Does 'mus' not serve?
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/lexindex?lookup=mus&lang=la

> From:    Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: Backwards conlanging (repost)
>
> Smart person.  <shaking head>  Triconsonantal morphology is lovely, but
> it's a pain to take into consideration.  I would do what someone
> suggested and take the current version of Chevraqis as the
> proto-language, but it took me sooo long to devise a sound-set I liked
> and that fit in with what I already had for names in the associated
> story-world, and I'm reluctant to toss it all.
Is it feasible to attempt a reconstruction of a
pretriconsonantomorphological phase of the language instead? Or not, look
into the history of proto-Semitic reconstruction. If you do have to end up
using the current as the protoform, you can probably keep the names similar
or the same (they change unpredictably, could be learned borrowings, etc).
Ai.


     *Muke!
--
http://muke.twu.net/