Re: Spelling

On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 00:25, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>:
>
> >
> > Etábnanni /"rAmn}n/ isn't terribly readable, at least to those
> > unfamiliar with it. I was trying to get something odd but it failed
> > and
> > became too regular.
>
> Bernard Werber, a French sci-fi writer mostly known for his trilogy "Les
> Fourmis" (the Ants) states it quite well (I paraphrase here because I don't
> remember the exact quote): the human mind naturally makes patterns, even in
> places where they don't exist, and resisting this tendency is extremely
> difficult. So it's not surprising that Etábnanni became too regular. It's just
> a normal human tendency. I myself have terrible difficulties fighting this
> tendency while creating Maggel. Until now, I managed only by having a
> contradictory set of regular rules for the orthography. So although I still
> have the tendency to use regular rules, those rules have been designed
> consciously to fight the appearance of patterns :)) . I keep some, because a
> natural orthography must have some patterns after all, but not too many. Also,
> the result of those rules is that even without irregularities each polygraph
> has usually three to five different possible readings. This helps making the
> orthography look irregular. But in fact it's not irregular, it's just plain
> evil ;)))) . Mwahahahahahahaha!!!!
Indeed. I realised, as I was writing my original thingy there, that what
I should've done was emulated English by having a bunch of different
orthographies combine into one, rather than emulating Japanese and
separate foreign words from the batch (the logic was that if I wrote
words from a foreign language in the foreign script, it'd add
irregularities). Although that wouldn't work well historically; the Táb
(/TAf/) were isolationists and never invaded (boring world history). I
guess I could've just said that two dialects combined into one or
something. /me feels another sketchlang coming on.

> > But Christophe (there, singled out again!)
>
> The ransom of success :)) .
:P Being vocal more like ;)

> It is pronounced (and you probably didn't guess ;)) ): ["heZvI "DIx_j @~n "AVz]
> in X-SAMPA. And the evil in this is that it's an example of perfectly regular
> orthography ;))))))))) (in the sense that it follows perfectly the set of rules
> that I created. There are plenty of other words which don't :)) ).
An examples of words were <isbfi> is pronounced something other than
/ZvI/, for example?

Tristan.

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