OT: Semi-OT: Several Questions

Hey everyone!

I have several questions and something to announce.

1. Lithuanianness
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In the threads about Happy (Gay/Straight) Conlang Day, people said they were
(not) cleanshaven, (not) straight, and (not) Lithuanian. What does having no
beard and not being Lithuanian to do with being hetero- or homosexual? Why
Lithuanian? Is this due to some stereotype picture?

2. Consonant Harmony
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Someone suggested to google for Gunnar Ó. Hansson's recent dissertation
about this topic to get information about this phenomenom. I found his site
at Chicago University where there is a table of contents. Heck, that
dissertation has 400+ pages! I thought it would be just some brief
information with examples, coming as a brochure! However, Hansson says
there, if you're interested in obtaining his 'book' as PDF, you should send
him an email. I did so, because I wanted to know more than just the headings
of the chapters. He still did not answer, there was no reply in my spam
filter either. I checked it every day, except yesterday because my server
was down (explanation see under 3). Anyone already has got this PDF file and
can tell us more about consonant harmony? It seems to be quite an
interesting feature. Maybe I shouldn't have written Mr Hansson that I'm no
linguist but "only" a conlanger, I don't know. Although there were some
typos, it was clear what I wanted. Is "Dear Mr Hansson" offensive in any
way? AFAIK it shouldn't be. I didn't know his degree, so I wrote "Mr". I
could also have written "Dear Sir", maybe this would have been better anyway.

3. Problems with sound changes
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I decided to now only refine Ayeri's grammar if necessary and to invent tons
of words for it to get something like Latin. Perhaps some conculturing. It's
for further conlanging, a proto-language maybe comes later. I know that some
sound changes are necessrary in either direction, but I have absolutely no
clue what could be subject to change. A wordlist is at
http://www.beckerscarsten.de/temp/ayeri.lex -- IMPORTANT: Maybe my server is
still partly inaccessible. My host is moving its servers from Nuremberg
(Nürnberg?) to Munich. They started yesterday morning, writing it might take
a whole day until everything is done. I hope my data won't get deleted.

4. Being away next weekend
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From next week's Thursday (July 29) to Sunday (August 1), I'm not at home.
I'm in Kiel with my youth group, on the annual "EC-Tagung" (EC = Entschieden
für Christus, it's Christian Endeavour (CE) in English. CE is something
similar to the YMCA). Because I'm a digest-subscriber, there is no need to
go nomail for just 4 days. I won't have any chance to read my mail, though.

That was it. Please start new split-off threads to answer, to avoid
confusion (e.g. "Consonant Harmony (was: Semi-OT: Several Questions)").

5. Server offline ATM
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Because as explained above, I have no really working mail access at the
moment, could someone please be so kind and send me the Digest containing
the mails from July 25, 2004 6:00 am GMT+1 to July 26, 2004 6:00 am GMT+1 to
beckerscarsten at web dot de? This is my second email adress which is still
working because it's another host. Thank you very much!

-- Carsten

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