Re: in other ways...
| From: | BP Jonsson <bpj@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Friday, September 3, 1999, 13:54 |
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At 21:46 -0500 2.9.1999, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: BP Jonsson <melroch@...>
>To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
>Sent: Thursday, September 2, 1999 8:13 AM
>Subject: Re: in other ways...
>
>
>> ---
>> Message from: "BP Jonsson" bpj@netg.se, melroch@hotbot.com
>>
>>
>> >Potential history of English language. This how it could be :
>> >saying "royal" but writing "kingisk".
>>
>> Just for the record: Middle Persian was the other way around, they wrote
>_royal_ but said "kingly", so to speak. (Actually: wrote MLK but said
>"shah"!)
>
>MLK=the initials of Martin Luther *King*... coincidence?? *spooky music*
>:)
Hehe! I suppose you know that MLK is the Semitic root for "king" (melek,
molok, malik, malka...) I just discovered that the logogram used in MP is
supposed to to be in fact MLKY, meaning "my king" in Aramaic, though it is
used simply for "king". An "empty" yod-like squiggle at the end of words
is so common in MP that I hadn't even noticed it before.
>
>> >Has anybody done this potential development for languages?
>> >What would have happened to English if normans had been beaten!
>>
>> William Morris pondered that question, as has Poul Anderson. Both have
>experimented with texts too.
>
>It's kind of happened in Japanese... most kanji symbols have both a
>Chinese-derived pronunciation and a native pronunciation, and which one you
>use depends on the word in question.
Yeah, kinda the same, except that in MP you have an Aramaic *phonetic*
spelling which is read as a native Iranian word. Totally weird! If the
script hadn't been as corrupt as the worst modern Roman handwriting --
imagine if that had been the only form of our script in existence! -- the
system would probably not have survived, but as it was those Aramaic
spellings were often easier to recognize and shorter to write than the
corresponding native phonetic spelling.
/BP
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
B.Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> <melroch@...>
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)