Re: Tallefkeul: tones and whatnot

En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

>
> Is there any kind of internal explanation of Maggel's weird
> orthography?
>
Not really. Although I can always explain it through a mix of:
- try to denote 70+ phonemes with 17 letters and no diacritics,
- the orthography was designed by bards, who for aesthetic reasons made
extremely strange things (you can also include the use of drugs in it ;)) ),
- once designed, the orthography was completely frozen (there again for
aethetic reasons, or because the people speaking Maggel are extremely
conservative or made it on purpose to have a language which doesn't need to be
coded, just write it down ;))) ) and sound change destroyed the little sense
there was left.

What do you think of that? ;))))

> As for weirdifying it even more, have you included weirdo
> abbreviations,
> like f'rinstance "Salop" for Shropshire?
Be careful not to wish things too much, you may get them ;))) . Actually,
Maggel's compounding system is nothing else then that!!! Maggel is not really a
compounding language (in fact, not at all), but often used expressions get
phonologically eroded and end up as abbreviations of the Hebbrew kind. They are
normal words (often nouns) but have strange plural, dual, complement and/or
construct forms because of their origin (since Maggel is mostly head-first,
those strange forms involve generally changes in the middle of the word, which
used to be the end of the head word of the phrase which originated the word
;))) ).

 The particular idea that
> strikes me
> at the moment is that _Maggel_ itself ought to be abbrevved "Ngr" on
> account
> of Yargish inability to pronounce /m/ or /l/. Or even better "Nrg" -
> introduced by a dyslectic Orc! Now, Maggel and Yargish presumably
> don't
> exist in the same coniverse, but you get the picture.
>
Hehe, I like it!! Actually, if Maggel ever gets a conculture, it might be an
idea ;)) .

> And the word |a fre| cries out for a change [fR]>[fX]>[X]. I swear!
>
Not in my French mouth. The [fR] cluster is quite stable for me ;))) . Although
if I was really phonetic it would probably be [fR_0] indeed (voice assimilation
in Maggel is strong, but liquids, rhotics and nasals are usually transparent to
it, meaning that they get voiced or unvoiced, but don't trigger a change of
voice themselves. Because of that, I allow myself to not be exactly phonetic in
my transcriptions. Just "phonetic enough"). But I may invent a few words later
with the digraph |fr| marking [x] ;))) (after all, I already have |ufd|
pronounced [&g], so that wouldn't be much worse ;))) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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