Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: My new project - comments appreciated

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 14, 2004, 9:50
Philip Newton wrote:

>On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 09:22:32 +0100, Joe <joe@...> wrote: > > >>Incidentally, about the phonology: >> >>If a sound regularly changes in one language to another, the language in >>which the sound is kept distinct gets the orthography, and the >>'official' pronunciation. So, as an example - 'th'. Dutch, 'd', Scots >>'th', Frisian 'd'. While it's a tie, Dutch(and Frisian) confuses the >>sound with plain 'd', so, while that may be a dialectal feature of >>Dutch, it will be written 'th'. And soforth. >> >> > >Sounds a bit like Interlingua again :) > >IIRC their rules about forms of words include something along the >lines of "If language X regularly changes letter A into letter B [e.g. >representing regular sound change], then this language-specific change >shall not be used to infer a spelling; rather, the underlying spelling >shall be used". That is, spelling idiosyncrasies belonging to a given >language are not taken into account. > >
Indeed. This obviously only occurs for straight A->B spellings, though. And I'm not sure about removing innovations to quite the extent that Interlingua does. If we have a phonology of A, B, C, D, E, and languge Z has E and C collapse(into C), I'm going to make sure that E, not C, is the standard spelling. Equally, if a sound is eliminated in one language, it will always be kept, just to keep maximum differentiation. On the other hand, if E->F, then things get more difficult.
>Or were you going purely by majority, rather than what the >"underlying" sound is? For example, if sound P split into Q and R in >two of the four languages, would you prefer the "Q" and "R" spellings >for those words in which the sound occurs, on the basis of >"distinctiveness rules", or the "P" spelling, on the basis of the >splitting being language idiosyncrasy? > >
There are various possibilities. The first is that I may just invent a new letter, distinguising X->R from P->R(for instance, the example, that I'm now not sure of, of 'ołd', instead of 'old'). On the other hand, the alphabet gets a little unwieldy after a while. If that's the case, I'll probably a)Compare with Low Saxon b)Take the maximum splitting. Unless it merges a sound, in which case, I won't.
>Interlingua also uses cognates which keep a given spelling do >determine whether a given morpheme would be recognisable - for >example, English has "father" but also words such as "patriarchal", >indicating that a morpheme along the lines of "patr-" would be >recognise and needn't contain initial |f|. > >
I'll probably avoid that, unless it's absolutely neccesary. And now, the first sententce - 'I ken him not' - 'I don't know him'. I decided (arbitrarily) to keep both 'I' and 'Ik', the latter before vowels, the former before consonants.