Re: New Hadwoid lang

On Sat, 28 Jul 2001, Muke Tever wrote:

> Okay, today I spent making a set of sound changes for zompist's sounds
> program to transform Hadwan into Middle Atlantic (Time: c400-1500AD Place:
> dragons' city Atlantis), and got it all set up to spit out perfect IPA
> whatnot.
>
> Yay.
>
> Only but now I had a problem.  From the tidy Hadwan vowel system
>
>     a á  e é  i í  o ó  y ý
>    [A Q: E e: I i: U u: Y y:]
>
> Atlantic develops a hideous new set of vowels, dropping length entirely:
>
>    [@ A e E i I o O u U 9 Y y]
Hideous? Hardly! It'd be fun to see the development here ...

> Well, actually it drops phonemic length.  Stressed vowels in open syllables
> are longer.  And since I don't know how stress works yet, I have to mark the
> stress.  Not so easy, because stressed vs unstressed looks like this:
>
>    Unstr [ @  A O E e   i o u 9 Y]
>    Str   [A E  O   I  e i U u Y y]
I'm not sure I understand this here; do you mean that stressed
[A, E] neutralize to unstressed [@], and that stressed [O] and
[I] each have two unstressed counterparts?

> And I spent a while trying to find a gracious way to *spell* that.  In the
> end I came up with this:
>
>            a  à ò e è   i o u y` y
>    Unstr [ @  A O E e   i o u 9  Y]
>    Str   [A E  O   I  e i U u Y  y]
>           á é  ó   î  ê í û ú ý  y^
>
> I had originally wanted to spell the (tenser?) vowels (I always get tense
> and lax mixed up.  I mean the ones generally SAMPA'd in caps) with grave
> (unstressed) and circumflex (stressed) but since [E] is much, much more
> common than [e].. it got ugly having è è è èvèrywhere.  And there didn't
> seem to be any point in having â and ô without á or ó.  ... It can still use
> help, since it's still too overaccentedy.  (Maybe I might decide to ungrave
> vowels in case endings, where everyone, theoretically, knows how they're
> pronounced, and before [G], where [e] is most common...)
I understand that the romanization of a conlang is fraught with
many aesthetic considerations, but it is just a representation
of a deeper, more precious truth. If I had my druthers, I'd
eliminate all diacritics in favor of bi- and trigraphs. But
again, it's an aesthetic preference. I just recently read a
paper on the orthography of the Ormulum; now there was a guy who
understood how to write English! It's led me to rethink some of
my own conlang orthographic habits.

(I'd actually be happy with adding some letters to the basic
set; things like thorn, eth, wynn, and some Cyrillic characters
that seem to be really useful as well.)

> Anyway,..
>
> Having a go at a sentence:
>
>     Arkó îg hódzhèghvêgh zhûvxechor romalhûg a zhemûg.
>    [@r"kO: Ig "hO:dZeGveG "ZUvksEtS_hor rom@"5Ug @ ZE"mUg]
Gack. That's quite a bristly look ... but I like the sound of
it.

> The grammar is not entirely certain yet, but the changes I know of so far
> are implemented.  Also, imagine all those clumsy h's are the graceful
> diacritical marks they're supposed to be: carons, a bar on the l, and breves
> on the gs.
You mean there are even more diacritics? Huh. I suppose it would
have its own peculiar charm (somewhat like Vietnamese ...).

>  Eh.  I haven't checked against the native alphabet but I think
> they had a better starting set of letters to begin with, so it may be less
> of a problem for them.
Let's hope so. Of course, there is the possibility of having a
minimal orthography which doesn't mark all phonological
distinctions ... I designed this kind of orthography once upon a
time for Tepa. It encoded place of articulation for stops (but
not voicing, that being an allophonic variation), had a single
symbol for the nasals, and didn't distinquish vowels from glides
(much less vowel length). Then I realized that the culture
probably couldn't support writing, so I scrapped it.

> [snip]
>
> This was the language I asked about stress changes for.. I'm still not sure
> what I'm going to do about it.
I just replied on the stress stuff; I think it looks good.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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