Haploid Horatio and other scattered thoughts

John Cowan wrote:
>
> Mia Soderquist scripsit:
>
> > Horatio. Definitely H for Horatio...
>
> No, no, H for Haploid!
But...but... Haploid is such an ugly word (IMO)... I think it is
the -oid part of it...
And Horatio is such a cute name!

>
> (haploid: possessing only half the usual number of chromosomes, deriving
> them from a single parent only.)
Norns (from the game Creatures) manage to have 2 parents and only
a single (not paired) set of genes. They inherit a gene on each
locus from one parent or the other. [Computer Gaming Trivia]

I haven't started a new language yet, but have rather been
starting the rather tedious and awful task of typing the ea-luna
lexicon into the computer. It has a rather large vocabulary,
currently available only in handwritten form, in a notebook--
listed ea-luna to English, in ea-luna syllabary order. As you can
imagine, this makes finding words for translations a tad
difficult. I had started typing it all out, but I lost the floppy
I had stored it on, so we are starting from scratch.

But... I was thinking that I'd like to write into one of my
languages a way to talk about gerbil, mouse, and rat genetics...
A shorthand way to hold this conversation aloud:

Person 1: Wow! That's a pretty pink-eyed white gerbil! Is it
c(h)c(h)pp?
Person 2: No, it's aac(b)c(h)eeggpp...

At the moment, among gerbil fanciers on the Net,  the
conversation might go:

1: Is that a PEW?
2: No, it is a pink-eyed light colorpoint silver nutmeg.

Which seems like a fairly good way of handling it, maybe. Each
locus is represented that way. But that still doesn't do anything
at all for talking about, say, a golden agouti that is
AaCc(h)EeGgPp, which would look identical to one that was
AACCEEGGPP. So that's what I want to tackle...

Sorry to have gotten off on this tangent... Just had that on my
brain...
Not sure I am going to tackle it head-on until I am done all this
typing.
[heaving a heavy sigh]

--

Mia Soderquist (tuozin@dmv.com)
clank clank *crash* clank clank *crash*
(Two knights walk into a bar)