Re: A prioi vs. A posteriori ?

In a message dated 2/4/2003 11:29:37 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR parisen:


> En réponse à James Landau <Neurotico@...>:
> 
> >
> >  That was you??? It was the very same person who gave us Maggel all
> > along?
> 
> Well, at least I do have a language like that, and I did mention it this 
> way on
> the list ;)) . So I seem to fit the criteria here ;)))) .
 Did you really? Well, let's check listserv.brown.edu:

 Searching the archives for "masculine feminine rebel" . . .

 We get this one:

"On of my first "serious" conlang was a half-hearted IAL, based on the idea 
thata true IAL should be easy to pronounce to everyone. I ended up using only 
fourvowels (/a/, /o/, /u/ and /i/, which had allophone [e] at the end of a 
word,don't ask me why...) and four consonants (/k/, /m/, /s/, /f/, I had only 
onestop because I considered that they were too difficult :)) . How 
naive...). Thegrammar was basically a monster mixing noun cases, gender (a 
masculine in -aand a feminine in -o, it was my rebel days ;))) ), and verbs 
using plenty ofperiphrastic constructions a la English verbs."

The header being from none but:
From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>

 So that post was really yours!

> > Interesting that I didn't attach a name to it in my memory. Well, even
> > as an
> > auxlanger, your creations are very different from Romaclone or Ygyde!
> 
> LOL! It was also my first serious attempt (read: non-Latin-clone) at a 
> conlang,
> and I was something like 15. And I never seriously thought it would really
> become an auxlang. The only auxlangish trait was the small number of 
> different
> sounds of the language (and they were not chosen for frequency ;))) ). I 
> mean,
> how can a language with exceptions be an auxlang?! ;))))
 Hey, does anyone here want to try a hand at making a jokelang called 
Romaklono or Eurokloni or something like that? (-o or -i, depending on what 
you decide all nouns will end in). The language will have all the most 
salient traits of the Euroclone proposals, with all the worst trends that you 
keep seeing in all the IAL descriptions really overdone. It will come 
complete with the endless and repetitive bragging that people who want to 
outdo Esperanto emit, with its own site that announces that [language name 
here] is a wonder language, is faster and easier to learn than ANY other 
language in the world, has easily recognized roots, can solve ALL the 
problems of language, repeated over and over again. Its advertising will 
exude the attitude seen again and again in those people who seem to think 
that there would be no more oppression, repression or cultural conflict and 
all these horrible things never would have happened if only we had all spoken 
a language in which the word for strawberry was "edijubilo" and the word for 
mango was "edigabilo". It will claim to be an auxiliary language, but the 
rest of the site will make pretty clear the impression that it tries to 
REPLACE all other languages and stick a blade up to people's throats to 
coerce everyone into learning it. It will be heralded as a newly discovered 
miracle cure for all the world's ills, when even the vocabulary isn't much 
different at all from any other Euroclones. 

> > Although I guess I'm guilty of selling into that stereotype . . . when
> > people
> > online mistake me as being female, I tell them, "No! Look at my name
> > again --
> > it's Neurotico! Not NeuroticA, NeuroticO!"
> >
> 
> LOL. In my fanfiction on my site, the female "bad guy" is called Nezayo, 
> while
> one of the male "bad guys" is called Nemina. The endings were on purpose 
> ;)))
> (the two other male "bad guys" are Netoy and Nespi :) ).
 Well, even Kankonia did have an emperor named Ekhula . . . and Cetonian has 
a 3/8 chance of giving you an -a name for either gender . . . since three of 
the syllables are ha, ma and wa. 

 (Well, at least when transcribed into an alphabet humans can use.)

 I haven't gotten to feel yet for what uniquely Hapoish names would sound 
like, although in my page for that planet I did use the name "Anita" as an 
example of how names work (the word "Anita" is taken as a verb meaning "to be 
able to be considered Anita", so "wo e Anita" translates as "she who 
is_able_to_be_considered_Anita"). Shaleyan names are coming out 
stereotypically feminine -a, although -e and -i probably won't be unknown. 
Stay tuned, I might develop these names, or you just might get a taste of 
what the speech of the Greys from Tayao or the OTHER residents of the Hapoish 
planet, the Brachyforms, sound like.

> >  BTW, I've found myself pronouncing "Maggel" as /'mag@l/ to myself (the
> >
> > at-sign is the schwa, right?
> 
> Yep :) .
 I'm learning!


> When I first saw it here, I found myself
> > mistaking it for the æ sound) when reading these notes, so as to sound
> > like
> > "Dr. Moggle's Alphabet Challenge" (whose author, in fact, I believe was
> > named
> > John Magel!) Does anyone here remember that book?
> >
 _Dr. Moggle's Alphabet Challenge_ was a book by John Magel published in 
1985. It told as a poem a story about being taken through the alphabet in a 
dream state by an elf named Trapisset, being the chosen one on a quest to 
find all the words. On each left page was the story continued, told in rhyme, 
and on each right page were full-page pictures, containing objects and org
anisms beginning with a letter of the alphabet, with the idea being to 
identify all 1,000 words illustrated throughout the book. The book was at the 
center of a big contest at the time, and amidst all its spiritual themes 
about "the quest", it announced that there were two words in the book that 
were both illustrated, and spelled out by name in the pictures. The big prize 
would be given to the entrant who wrote in and identified both words, and if 
more than one had figured it out, to the one who explained the most 
eloquently in an essay just what "the significance" of those two words were. 
For all the hype, I never did hear what became of the contest, or who their 
much-anticipated winner was.

> I actually never heard of it!!! I want to know more about it! I love
> synchronicities like that!!!! :)
> 
> >
> >  Are you referring to the Druids?
> >
> 
> Nope, but Peter found it already. The influence was the French word 
> "dryade",
> which comes from Greek IIRC. And I wonder if it's not realted through PIE 
> with
> the word "druid". Whaddya think?
 Well, that's another good source to get your word from. I suppose "dendron" 
is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root too? 

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