Re: Sevorian

Piisløt et-Ian (Jan wrote):

>  --- James Campbell wrote:
> > After a break, Sevorian has now returned to the
> > Zolid Matters website (www.zolid.com/zm).
>
> Well, finally! I'm very glad it's there after all.
Yes, I know I've been appallingly dilatory in this matter. The Jameld
dictionary took a year (or three) more than I intended, which delayed
everything else.

> I
> have been waiting for it impatiently, and I must admit
> that I often tried the link for more info than just
> the message that it is going to be there some day!
> The reason is, I have always been fascinated by the
> idea of North Slavonic conlangs. I am the proud father
> of three of them (Vozgian, Motyak and Slopik), and I
> was delighted to discover that there actually were
> more North Slavonic conlangs, including Sevorian. The
> samples I had seen looked quite promising, and I was
> genuinely disappointed I couldn't find more about it.
Thanks for your patience and interest... At least now I have uploaded just
about everything that was ever written about Sevorian. If it's not there,
then it was never decided on, and there are a lot of holes in Sev. However,
I realise that there aren't many examples (if any), and I intend to flesh
out the page with some sample sentences and examples of usage this weekend.

> Does "unalive" mean "dead"? Or is there still hope
> that Sevorian will be revived some day?
Well, I think it's dead... but Sevorian has a habit of delurking every few
years, comet-like, in a brief flash of activity, then returning to obscurity
for a while. I have no plans for Sevorian at the moment, other than to
adequately document it.


> Anyway, I like it a lot, as you may have noticed.
Thanks!

> If I
> may nevertheless allow myself to a few remarks about
> the orthography:
> - I find the very frequent use of "ø" slightly
> disturbing.
8<
> - About the dotted "s" and "z": why not use hacheks
> instead? This is normal in any Slavonic language using
> the Latin script, except Polish, and does not present
> the average PC user with problems.
I take your points... but I like the "look-and-feel" of Sev! S-hacek and
Z-hacek are, IIRC, part of the standard Windows character set, but not part
of Latin-1, so they don't display correctly on Macs or Un*x machines... I
have restricted my web pages to named-entity extended characters only. I
have on occasion considered using hacek instead, but the dots are part of
what makes Sevorian "Sevorian."

> - The alternative spelling, "sx" and "zx" is of course
> possible, but somehow I feel that reading become less
> fluent.
Agreed. This was a convention that Alexis [Hansen, my erstwhile
collaborator] and I came up with, because at the time any extended
characters in email were lost. Alexis couldn't even read o-slash in my
messages, so we had to use "o/".

> - What was this dotted "h" supposed to sound like?
"Hx" was intended to be [C], contrasting with "h" [x]. In the end I decided
to merge them into "h", rather than have separate letters (as is the case
with Jameld, which uses GH and CH respectively).

The best thing about "hx" was that it needed a special letter all to itself
for the Cyrillic script I devised. Hmmm, I ought to put that on the site as
well...

VTV,

James

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james@zolid.com  James Campbell                              www.zolid.com
Jameld web site: www.zolid.com/zm  Plexus Inventions: www.zolid.com/plexus
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