CONLANG Digest 4 Apr 2001 (#2001-95)

> From:    Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
> Subject: Re: telepaths, sound changes, age changes, v changes, and lexicon
>
> > Yo hey, maybe anyone can help me.  Proto-Hadwan has these three pure
> > sibilants (i.e., non-affricates) <s> /s/, <s,> (s-cedilla), and <s'>
> > (s-caron) /S/.   As you can see I have reasonable phonetic values
> > for <s> and <s'>, but not one for <s,>, anybody have any ideas?  It
> > develops from IE palatal *k, and results in Hadwan /s/  (...eventually).
>
> My favorite 3-sibilant system (well, actually it's 6, with both voiceless
> and voiced versions) is:
> {plain s} = /s/
> {s-hacek} = /S/
> {s-acute} = /S*/
>
> /S*/ is a whistling kind of sibilant made at the same place as /S/ but
> with the tip of the tongue.  It's voiced version sounds like "throat
> singing", or at least what ends up happening when i followed the
> directions on a website someone posted here.
Yeah, that's a sound like what I figured it must be (although the reference
to throat-singing escapes me, never having bothered to look over the
concept).

> From:    John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> Subject: Re: Uusisuom (phonemic????)
>
> > Single letters are shown by enclosing them between < > - but as these
may
> > be misinterpreted if reading mail through a browser, many (including
> > myself) prefer to use { }.
>
> I have never understood what is wrong with quotation marks: the forms "a"
> and 'a' far more natural to me than either <a> or {a}.
When they're by themselves a graphemic representation can be "jimos", but
when I personally put, say, a gloss afterwards the English goes in the
quotes:  <jimos> "Earth".

> From:    Robert Hailman <robert@...>
> Subject: Re: illithid phonetics
>
> Well, I don't know what he has to do with the Illithids, but he's the
> crab-like Doctor guy on television's Futurama. All of those crab-people
> do seem to have Yiddish accents - although if anyone on the show is
> Jewish I'd say it's Bender.
Hehe, ISTR Bender being 'hecho en Mexico'.

> From:    Daniel44 <Daniel44@...>
> Subject: Re: Uusisuom (phonemic????)
>
> Ray,
>
> Thanks for explaining that to me.
>
> Doubled consonants are pronounced as in Finnish. For example, 'kekko'
(clock
> or time) - you would 'hold on' to the middle 'kk' section for longer than
if
> there was only one 'k' in the middle of the word.
Are these stops unaspirated?  If so, could an aspirated stop be mistaken (or
even allophonous) for a geminate one?

> From:    Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
> Subject: Re: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)
>
> >I'll throw in some other beautiful languages from my point of view: I
> >like Icelandic very much as it is spoken (my L1 is German if anyone
> >wants to interpret that).  I have this `Einu sini teildu
> >Nordhanvinturinn og Solin, hvort theirra vaeri sterkari'
>
> "Once upon a time the North Wind and the Sun quarrelled(?), (about) who of
> them was the strongest", or something like that. Weirdly enough, I once
read
> a book that had an example where story that began like this (in Swedish)
was
> given first in normal writing and the in phonemic and phonetic writing to
> demonstrate who the IPA worked.
Actually I think "The North Wind and the Sun" is kind of a semi-standard for
this.  I have wav files off some website (and not jnw's pacad site)
somewhere with it in different languages.

Also my desk is being overrun by small ants.

> From:    Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
> Subject: VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)
>
> We can be fairly certain, I think, that it was a labial
> approximant of some sort; but whether it was the bilabial [w] of British &
> American English, or the labio-dental (denoted rather oddly IMO as [P] in
> SAMPA, a stylized lower case upsilon in real IPA)
That SAMPA [P] sign also appears to be encoded as [v\].   (At least in
'X-SAMPA', I never look at SAMPA psilon)

> In either case (tho more particularly in the latter, obviously), if
> friction is added to the approximant, the sound becomes [v].  Frictioned
> versions of approximants are not uncommon; the European Spanish speakers
> I've met have had a tendency to add slight friction to /j/, so that it
> sounds more like [Z], thus, e.g. _yo_ (I) tends to sound like [Zo].  This
> sort of thing was clearly going on in Vulgar Latin/Proto-Romance.
Palatal fricative [j\] (curly-tailed j).  It does that in American Spanish
too;  my family has it.

> From:    David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
> Subject: Re: lexicon
>
> << Me too.  Word creation is the whole point of the exercise to me.  I
love
> some of my odd lexiclaizations.   >>
>
> My first language has over 100 color terms, and growing.  I have a
separate
> noun form for colors, so I take the noun "tree" and put it into color form
> meaning "tree-colored".  But aside from noun colors and normal colors, I
> decided to go ahead and include all the old color terms found in the
> languages of (usually) people of unindustrialized countries.  Like, a term
> for any color from black to blue to green (like the color of the ocean), a
> color for green and yellow and brown (like the color of a forest) or the
> color for blue purple red and orange (like the color of a sunset).  Ah,
> color...  I love it.
Hadwan has six 'basic' color terms (where other terms exist but you'd say
those are all 'a kind' of these).  I still haven't worked out morphology,
but they'll end up as some derivatives of the following (which would be verb
forms)...

black:  milic  /mIlIts/
white:  šuhic  /SUxIts/
red:    rujic  /rUdZits/
yellow: šilic  /SIlIts/
green:  blîc   /BlI:ts/
blue:   hlaiic /xlajits/ (not certain about this form yet)

I'm not entirely sure yet which words 'orange' and 'brown' would fall under.
[What do Berlin and Kay say?]

> From:    jesse stephen bangs <jaspax@...>
> Subject: Re: telepaths, sound changes, age changes, v changes, and lexicon
>
> > > I don't know.  There's some pretty weird stuff out there, like s > r,
> > > which is attested multiple times, but which I can't justify in my own
> > > mind.
> >
> > I believe that it passes through 'z' first usually (s > z > r), although
I'm
> > not sure that's much better ;)  Hadwan has that change, itself,
actually.
>
> As do some of my conlangs ;-).  But I still can't see how people would
> confuse [z] with [r], especially if that [r] is a trill or flap, as in
> Latin.
Hmm, do we actually know which [r] Latin had?

> > Yo hey, maybe anyone can help me.  Proto-Hadwan has these three pure
> > sibilants (i.e., non-affricates) <s> /s/, <s,> (s-cedilla), and <s'>
> > (s-caron) /S/.   As you can see I have reasonable phonetic values for
<s>
> > and <s'>, but not one for <s,>, anybody have any ideas?  It develops
from IE
> > palatal *k, and results in Hadwan /s/  (...eventually).
>
> You might try [ç] (c-cedilla), which is a reasonable evolution from *ky.
> Or [tS] or [ts].
Yes, like c-cedilla...
It may not actually _need_ a phonetic value.  It doesn't survive into
Hadwan, and I don't think it survives into "Askr." either (I think the old
<s> changes to something else, and the <s,> takes its place).

["Askr..."  ... An Eastern derivative of proto-Hadwan.  I don't have a name
yet, 'Askr' is an abbreviation I use in my notes that has no expansion
whatever] :p

> From:    jesse stephen bangs <jaspax@...>
> Subject: Re: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)
>
> > People who take
> > German are made fun of, let alone anyone who so much has heard of any
other
> > language from any country surrounding Germany, or near it
(France/Belgium
> > excluded, of course).
>
> They're actually made fun of?  That's simply outrageous.  The German
> language students at my high school were a minority, but they were hardly
> ostracized (sp?).  Stupid fools.  They obviously can't appreciate the
> beauty of German and the other Germanic tongues.
Hrrf.  I had a vague stereotype in high school that men took German, women
took French, and slackers took Spanish. ;)

> From:    Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> Subject: Re: telepaths, sound changes, age changes, v changes, and lexicon
>
> > But yeah, Latin v > Spanish v.  In fact I think that etymology is the
main
> > way to tell which should be used in (what I guess is the majority of)
> > dialects of Spanish that don't differentiate <v> and <b>.
>
> As far as I know, there are NO dialects of Spanish that differentiate
> {v} and {b}.
Well, there is the
spelling-pronunciation-by-American-students-in-high-school-Spanish-classes
dialect, which certainly does... ;)
I don't believe my teacher taught us they were the same (although he
probably pronounced them correctly himself)...

> From:    Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: illithid phonetics
>
> > As do many people in my circle of friends here at college.
> > They also "mew" [mju].
> >
> > I'm sure they'd all love to meet mew!  ;-)
>
> (more delighted) Mew!  Meep!  Mew!
>
> We people who meep will eventually take over the world.  =^)
"Harf" is something I say a lot.  Only it doesn't sound anything like that.
The whole word is ingressive, it starts way back in the throat (I couldn't
tell where exactly, my practical knowledge of points of articulation stops
with the velum) and it hasn't normally got an /f/, it usually ends rather
abruptly...

> From:    kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET
> Subject: Two Questions
>
> 1. I've just been putting together a very basic Postscript font for
> the traditional Saprutum script but I don't know how to import it
> into any other software, this means I can only demonstrate it in
> Postscript files. Question -- can any of you read/display/print
> Postscript files. Would encapusulate PS (*.eps) help, that is a file
> for each page which some graphics packages can read?
Paint Shop Pro [from http://www.jasc.com/ I think] can apparently display PS
and EPS files (and presumably from there, save them into various image
formats).

Also if you have Fontographer you should be able to make a TrueType font
file from postscript files, IIRC...  I have an old, old version of
Fontographer floating around on this hard drive somewhere...

> 2. Among other things, I've been using the Saprutum version of the
> "The Dog's Grave" as a test piece, and it got stuck in my mind,
> especially after I found a tune that fits. Today I found myself
> singing "Kalbum wegannaba baxram ... " out loud on the way back from
> the shops. A dead classical language from a place which officially
> "isn't there" even in the alternative reality it might come from.
> Should this worry me, do I need professional help, or is it perfectly
> normal and happens all the time?
Yes.

     *Muke!
--
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/