Re: Nouns, they hate me!

Douglas Koller wrote:
>
> does "x" have the Chinese pinyin value? I saw "xu!" and immediately thought of
> the Chinese equivalent for "phew!," in the sense of "Phew! I just rolled that
> 200lb. rock into place in the stone wall." (I know your meaning is different;
> I'm just asking about pronunciation).
>
x is /x/. I suppose I could have gone with "kh" to be a little more transparent.

> Aesthetics being somewhat a personal thing, I don't understand what is particularly
> "hideous" about the brick thang and its endings. If I were to presume to make
> a suggestion, it would be to let things cool (maybe not right now, but after
> the next incarnation of change you incur). I was appalled for a while at
> Géarthnuns' nominative plural ending "-p" (I thought of going to "-n" as it
> *was* more typical), and the genitive plural "-ng" ; now these seem the most
> natural thing in the world and I can't imagine revamping, now that I've
> internalized them. As Tolkein said in the "Secret Vice" (I radically
> paraphrase), one can fall into the trap of making a language too "pretty."
>
I guess it isn't so bad. I guess it just looked maybe a little
Latinesque to me, or maybe it was just a side effect of not looking at
the language for a month and a half or so. Things don't always look
the way you remember when you put a project aside for a while.

 Looking at it today, it might just be that particular word that
bothers me, and in that case, I think I'll just proceed with what I've
got and let it go. I'm not in love with every word of English, after
all, but I manage to speak it everyday without being overly sensitive
to how many ugly words there are, and if the main fault of "vecinam"
is that it reminds me of Latin... I'll survive. :)


--
~*~
M.S. Soderquist