Re: USAGE: Translation challenge: GBS

Quoting Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

> --- In conlang@y..., Dennis Paul Himes <himes@C...> wrote:
> > John Cowan <jcowan@R...> wrote:
>
> > > Chang at leisure was superior to Lynch in his rouge, munching a
> lozenge
>
> > Change at lezhre wuz soopeerreeer too Linch in hiz roozh, munchenge a
> loznj
>
> Ouch!  Words like soopeerreeer kinda defy the purpose of a reformed
> orthography.  =P
Indeed. There's a reason why many languages use diacritics
<personal opinion> digraphs are sloppy </opinion>.

> Also, I find it weird that he tries to render munching as /mVntSi:N/.
> I think we've had this discussion before on this list...  to me, the
> ending -ing clearly contains a short /I/ phoneMe (which may be
> realized by some as a tensed /i/, but definitely not long).
/N/ in my dialect makes all front vowels immediately preceding it
tense, so I would have to agree with the vowel quality he
used.  However, I didn't sense that he was asserting any kind of
vowel length in English; I thought he was invoking the standard
device of 'silent <e>' as a marker of historically long vowels
(i.e., not *currently* long vowels).

> The -ng
> was probably consequently pronounced /Ng/ in Old English (note that
> I have not the slightest idea of Old English), so I'd assume a word
> like *munchinge would have been syllabized as *mun.chin.ge, leaving
> the i inside a closed syllable, with no reason to be pronounced long.
It's true that the <g> was originally pronounced (and not just in the
ending, but also in words like <ring> and <sing>), but as a matter of
fact for many people the vowel quality is tense, NOT lax.

> Either way, spelling <munchenge> is just stupid, seeing as it suggests
> a word rhyming with lozenge or revenge...
Not stupid; it uses a standard technique for spelling the
descendents of historically long vowels, as in <spoke> and
<bake>, etc.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

Reply