Re: CHAT: Anglicisms

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Chris Peters wrote:

>      Out of curiosity, how aware are any of you of any Anglicisms in your
> conlangs, whether in grammar, phonology, or otherwise?  Or otherwise, if
> your L1 is other than English, how much does your native tongue tend to crop
> up in your project?  I find myself almost unawares favoring certain English
> sounds, or Japanese grammar, in Ricadh when I try to avoid it.  In a sense,
> Ricadh grammar has ended up as a kind of "reverse Japanese" ...
No Anglicisms that I know of, though it's not entirely impossible
that there are some because I'm practically bilingual. Valdyan does
have only the sounds that I can pronounce easily (no apico-alveolar
[r], for instance, but a uvular [R] with the [r] as an allophone for
those who naturally have it; that might be half-conscious revenge on
the speech therapist who spent an hour each week for two years trying
to teach me to say [r]).

I know only Indo-European languages (but an awful lot of those :-)
and I've never tried to deliberately introduce "neat" or "cool"
features; sometimes, in pessimistic moods, I think of Valdyan as a
very boring, stereotypical language (which a lot of people have
assured me that it isn't, so I'll ascribe that to insecurity made
worse by hay fever).

Sometimes I think I should make an effort to avoid boring familiar
features (like the third-person verbal ending -t) but the language
is too well set in its ways to suddenly acquire new grammar.
Developing the language is now a matter of (a) better description of
what I already know, (b) more words, (c) morphemic analysis, and (d)
still more words.

On the whole, I let things come as they will. When a word comes up
and it's too similar to something with a related meaning in English
or Dutch or some other well-known language, I usually try to replace
it before I start using it, but the word for "mountain" was "bryn"
long before I realized that that means "hill" in Welsh. That "orla"
means "eagle", like in Church Slavonic, is completely deliberate, on
the other hand; I noticed when I heard the Church Slavonic word ("so
that my youth is renewed like the eagle's", Psalm 103:5 in the New
International Version but 102in my book) that it analyzes in Valdyan
as "grand master bird".

   Irina


            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastinay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)