Babel text in Shfanzhol

Adam Walker scripsit:

> I only noticed two occurences of doubled
> letters: in _tsoosh_ and _naa_ whadupwidat?
Todos and nada respectively: intervocalic and final d are gone, leaving
hiatus.

> And then there's the devine title, SHENZHOL.
Señor, as Steg says.  No known Chinese influence here!

Roger Mills scripsit:

> Without an intensive read, it appears that maybe the reflexes of **/t/
> vary a bit:  tsoa, siedzha, ajonteshio, oleiense, oslo(sh), todzhe,
> shableshielon, ashta, sienen, eshto.  There is probably a system.....
I made some errors here.  Generally t > s, but initially ts, but s
again before an i-glide.  d > t initially and after a consonant (when
it's a stop, basically), disappears otherwise.  I haven't decided what
happens to st (shs is just too bogus), and haven't been consistent.
The anaptyctic e has been lost, hence Shfanzhol, not Eshfanzhol.

The "Spanzhol" in the subject line (now fixed) was a failure to carry
through the sound changes sufficiently.

> Two "r"s crept in-- no doubt typos-- "I ushalon larizho en lukar...."
/r/ > /l/ only for the first instance (not countining rr or initial r,
which is phonemically rr).  All others remain.  There may be errors in
some words.

> Is "Bavel" right?? usually **b > p
Foreign word.

> kjosamoshlosh should be kjoshamoshlosh, no?
Yes.

> Otherwise it's fun, but ¡amor de dios, que feeeeeeeeeeo! tanto al
> ojo como al oído.
I hold no brief for the orthography, but I think it sounds rather nice,
actually.

Mark J. Reed scripsit:

> Affricativization (verbing weirds language!) of initial voiceless
> stops ([t] -> [ts], [p] -> [pf]); that's interesting.  A response to the
> English-speakers' aspiration of what are in native monolingual Spanish
> unaspirated stops, perhaps?
I don't really know what the motivation might be.  The changes to the
stops are precisely those of the 2nd (or High German) Consonant Shift
(not Grimm's/Verner's Laws, which are the First Consonant Shift).
As you conjectured, "j" represents /x/.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
In might the Feanorians / that swore the unforgotten oath
brought war into Arvernien / with burning and with broken troth.
and Elwing from her fastness dim / then cast her in the waters wide,
but like a mew was swiftly borne, / uplifted o'er the roaring tide.
        --the Earendillinwe