Re: Pre-Announcing New Language - Gôжd

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Peter Kolb <peterwlkolb@Y...> wrote:
> An
> essentialist description: Gôxd is essentially regressive Latin with
Celtic
> aspirations as spoken by a German  ;)  .
Looking foward to it.  ;)



> A brief overview of Gôxd:
>
> * Uses Schwartz-Shrift with some Cryllic extensions;
Black letter is "Fraktur" in German, Schwarzschrift is
actually used to mean "printed matter" as opposed to
e-Mail or Braille.



> An
> issue is that Adobe Acrobat cannot handle extended characters in
filenames.

It's always useful to have an ASCII transliteration of
your language.  In fact, none of my langs use any freaky
characters.  I used to be fond of such glyphs as a kid,
but my taste has since shifted towards non-trivial
spelling systems with regular characters.  ;)



> With little thought and with certain mistakes and with not very much
> knowledge of the frank language of French, I posit some
possibilities for
> heading towards 'phonetic' form:
>
> 1. "Alors, je comprends" -> "Alor, je conpran"
> 2. "Autre pays, autre moeurs" -> "Atr paei, atr maers"
> 3. "Le paraphluie est vert" -> "Le paraplui ae vair"
> 4. "Monsieur Staline est-il Russe?" -> "Msywe Stalin ae-tail Rwys?"
> 5. 1-10 -> Zaero, un, dwe, trwa, katr, sink, sees, sait, weet, nwaf,
dees.

Your lack of experience with French shows all too clearly,
I'm afraid.  You use |ae| in both |paei| and |maers|,
although they are pronounced differently (/pe'i/ vs
/m9R(s)/).  The same goes for |a| in |alor| and |atr|,
which are /a'lOR/ and /otR/.  You use |in| for /in/ in
|Stalin| /sta'lin/, but /E~/ in |sink| /sE~k/.  You
unnecessarily introduce |ee| for /i/ in |weet| and |dees|,
although you already have |i| for /i/ in |paei|, |Stalin|
etc.  Finally, the number 9 is /n9f/, not /nwaf/.

French is less in need of a spelling reform than English,
since its pronunciation is quite predictable (its spelling
isn't, though).  If you do want to write up a reform that
some Francophones are going to like (the majority of them
will probably oppose to any spelling reform), start with
a low-impact change that preserves the flavor of the
French orthography.  For example, regularize all the
spellings with irregular pronunciation, e.g. oeufs /2/ ->
oeux.  Note how oeufs drops a [z] in liaison: des oeufs
entiers [dez2zA~tje], so spelling it as only oeu wouldn't
do.  Then again, the original spelling has a more logical
relation to the singular oeuf /9f/, so it's questionable
whether the reformed spelling is preferable.  More
radical reforms such as a phonemic spelling can follow
later.

In general, liaison makes it rather difficult to find a
simple phonetic spelling.  Maybe one would have to define
a letter for liaison-[s], which is mute by default.  So
maybe fraise -> fraiz [fREz] but baies -> baix [bE],
baies entières -> baix antiairx [bEzA~tjER].  That's very
ugly, though.


-- Christian Thalmann