Re: Introducing Paul Burgess and his radioactive imagination!

Sally Caves wrote:
> It could be that I don't quite understand the Etabnanneric.  You seem to be
> saying that Etabnannery is an unpredictable system of spelling, rather than
> (what I had thought) one in which a limited set of characters serves double
> and triple duty to represent the sounds of its language and whose laws are
> complicated and have to be learned.
Well... both you and Keith are wrong, but you're closer. An
etabnannimous orthography is one which is predictable but doesn't really
seem so, with generally complex rules. If my understanding of Irish
spelling is correct, it's etabannimous.

(You're wrong because of the 'limited set of characters serves double
and triple duty' bit. Etabanni probably has about the same amount of
phonemes and characters---maybe more characters than phonemes, actually.
It's just the way it maps the characters to the sounds.)

>>English and French on the other hand are definitely etabnanneric. Oh,
>> yeah!
>
> Who is it invented Etabnannery?  And how is it pronounced? :)
Yours truly. /ramn&n@r\i/ is the pronunciation I usually give; map /a/
to however your dialect pronunces either 'rUm' or 'fAther', it doesn't
matter which.* (And the first /r/ should be a trill with the second an
English-style /r\/, but it isn't all that important.)

* Technically, it should be the fAther vowel (the first A in Etabanni is
both long and stressed in Etabnanni, and should have a macron and an
acute accent (which *doesn't* denote the stress!) in the Latin
transliteration, but using the rUm vowel sounds better to me. This may
or may not be because the vowels differ only by length for me and a
short vowel sounds better in that position than a long one.

Tristan.

Reply