Celtiboinking and mandarin musings

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

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