Re: CONLANG Digest

>From:    John Mietus <sirchuck@...>
>Subject: Your Help Appreciated
>
>I¹ve developed root-based vocabularies for a number of language families.
>What I would now like to do is take these families and apply sound changes
>to make them similar to the following real world families:
>
>1. Germanic
>2. Greek
>3. Latin
>4. Balto-Slavic
>5. Gaelic
>
>Since I have very little background in these tongues, any suggestions on how
>to make my proto-roots sounds like these languages would be greatly
>appreciated. This is part of a long, ongoing project, and I¹ll be more than
>happy to post reports of my results on the list before I work up a website
>devoted to it.
You might be looking for a chart something like this one:
http://members.xoom.com/piestudies/iephon.htm

Then again, you might not be, but that's what comes to mind.

>From:    DOUGLAS KOLLER <LAOKOU@...>
>Subject: Re: PinYin - Reformed Latin-script Mandarin writing
>
>Me, I like the diacritics (perhaps the exotica rearing its head again).
>Barring languages with simpler phonologies, you ditch the diacritics, you've
>gotta employ tortured digraphs and trigraphs, which you claim makes English
>convoluted. How else to map twenty-six letters to languages with over
>twenty-six phonemes?
Dare I say the magic words?   <evil grin>

         ALPHABET REFORM!   >:p

>From:    nicole perrin <nicole.eap@...>
>Subject: Re: "Re-formed" Latin-script writing
>
>Yes, this is true because you would want the writing system to be simple
>in a pidgin, but you cannot possibly (as Douglas Koller stated earlier)
>map more than 26 phonemes to 26 letters without using diacritics and/or
>digraphs, etc.  Furthermore, most languages spoken over a broad area in
>physical space have multiple dialects which are pronounced differently.
>Does each dialect have its own spelling, making it an effectively
>separate language?
Only if you're trying to spell *phoneTically*.  If you spell *phoneMically*
you can have wider currency of the language (where, say, American "house" and
Canadian "house" would still be spelled the same way).

Of course, if the dialects _do_ have different phoneme inventories, they may
indeed have different spellings (and may indeed begin to think of themselves
as separate languages).  But most likely if this happens there'll be
nationally adopted "standard" dialects...

Of course, English will never do spelling reform.  Even on "Star Trek", 500
years in the future they still spell English with modern American spellings ;)

     *Muke!

--
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"No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much imagined anything quite like it--
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