Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Celtiboinking and mandarin musings

From:Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 5, 2002, 0:00
On Mon, 4 Mar 2002 17:34:05 -0000
Keith Gaughan <kgaughan@...> wrote:

> From: Aidan Grey [mailto:grey@FAS.HARVARD.EDU] > > > So Keith, where in ireland are you? > > I'm from Sligo (the south of the county - take it from me, unless > you're from Sligo, you can't understand how important that is :-) > I'm living in Cork at the moment
Hmm... sounds familiar - I'm from Dublin (the south of the city - take it from me, unless you're from Dublin, you can't understand how important that is :-) (only joking - it's true but I don't give, as they say, a toss. Only I should point out I don't have a D4 accent - damn, a rock and a hard place!)
> > It would be cool to have a meeting of > > conlangers in Ireland. > > Yeah! All, um, uh, three of us, isn't it? Seriously though, it's a > good idea.
Am I the third or is there a fourth? ;) I always imagined, perhaps very wrongly, that this list contains (intermittently at least) a respectable chunk of the conlangers of this world... Perhaps this is wrong, a few times 3 or 4 conlangers per 3 or 4 million seems like a rather feeble concentration. Probably this is just an example of my non-network blindness - surely *everybody* in the world is onlne _now_?! Talking (irrelevantly) of Ireland and nets, why o why is the mandarin for "Ireland" °®¶ûÀ¼ "Ai4er3lan2" = "Love-net-orchid" ?! You'd think that even sticking to the representation "aierlan" you'd have a good few homophones (a max of 64 factoring in tones) before you choose from the homophonic alternatives. (And why not guo2 for "land" instead of "lan2"?!). After all, [A]merica is ÃÀ¹ú "mei3guo2" "Beautiful land" and (y)England is Ó¢¹ú "ying1guo2" "heroland". Then again pity poor Spain which is Î÷°àÑÀ "xi1ban1ya2", I think meaning "western-squad-tooth" ;) BTW, does anyone know how proper names in chinese dialects are handled? I mean if the hanzi are common to all dialects, including hanzi for place- and people- names which have been borrowed as "soundalikes", then presumeable this means that the english word, say "Ireland", in *mandarin* sounds like the characters °®¶ûÀ¼, while in other dialects these hanzi while still meaning the, erm, love-net-orchid don't sound like "Ireland". I guess it's not such a problem, but is this the way it works?
> Actually, there was going to be a Celtiboink > > (celticonlanger gathering) this summer too - maybe they > > should be combined.
Where was the celtiboink going to be held? Any anyway, what's the listserv address for the celticonlanglist? I've been meaning to join for a while (as if I need more to read). stephen

Reply

Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>