Re: Introducing Paul Burgess and his radioactive imagination!

On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 10:26:57AM +0100, BP Jonsson wrote:
> At 15:32 7.3.2003 -0500, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> >you can find out more about Ebisedian and judge for yourself whether it
> >deserves its label of obscurity, here:
> >        http://quickfur.ath.cx:8080/~hsteoh/conlang/tutorial.pdf
>
> Wow!  It's even readable in that orthography! :-)
In fact, I much prefer that orthography than in the ASCII orthography
which I use here only by necessity. The ASCII orthography is unconsciably
ugly, as Jesse Bangs puts it, and is probably responsible for a large part
of Ebisedian's freaklang reputation.

> How does that relate to the ASCIIfication you use in email?
The ASCII version simply substitutes the glyphs not representable in
ASCII:
- the smallcaps k, t, c, p with carets are written as K, T, C, P in the
  ASCII.
- reverse epsilon is written as _3_
- omega is written as _w_
- o-slash is written as _0_ (I was thinking of the old slashed-zero glyph
  from the character sets of long ago.)
- acute accent is indicated by suffixing with apostrophe (I know there are
  acute letters in ASCII, but they are missing a few important letters so
  I decided to use apostrophe for everything, for consistency's sake)
- macron is indicated by duplicating the vowel (so a-macron is written
  _aa_); adjacent identical vowels have an extra hyphen between them
  because otherwise they are misread as a single long vowel.
- smooth accent (the tear-drop accent) is indicated by prefixing with a
  backtick (`).
- subscript tilde (nasality) is indicated by suffixing with tilde (~).

> > The abrupt breathing, which is the normal vowel breathing, is pro-
> >nounced with a preceding glottal stop. For example, ¡ is pronounced
> >[Pi], and a¡ is pronounced [PaPi].
> >3
> > The smooth breathing, indicated as ` a, is pronounced with a preceding
> >semivowel. For example, ` ¡ is pronounced [ji], ` y is pronounced [4y], ` u
> >is pronounced [wu], and ` a is pronounced [a
> >
> >a].
> > The rough breathing, indicated as ha, is pronounced with a preceding
> >unvoiced glottal fricative. For example, h  3 is pronounced [h9:].
>
> This is exactly like Tibetan.  Did you steal it there, somewhere else or in
> thin air?
[snip]

Actually, I came up with it independently. It was only later when I was
struggling to find an IPA representation for it that somebody pointed out
that Tibetan also has it. Yet another anadewism. :-)


T

--
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

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