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Re: CHAT: Left-handed Lithuanians (was: My coming out as a conlanger)

From:Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Date:Thursday, October 3, 2002, 0:30
On Wed, 2 Oct 2002 20:22:01 +0100
=?iso-8859-1?q?Jan=20van=20Steenbergen?= <ijzeren_jan@...>
writes:
> --- Steg Belsky wrote: > > Well, as i mentioned in reference to my brother (who's > Left-Handed), if > > you count "of the Lithuanian (a.k.a. North-Eastern Ashkenazic) > Jewish > > Culture-Zone" as within the category "Lithuanian", then i guess > i'd be a > > somewhat 'real' Lithuanian on the List.
> Counting that as Lithuanian shouldn't be a problem, I think. Where > exactly is > your brother from? Probably the same place as you, I may assume... > Didn't you mention recently that he is an ex-conlanger as well? What > language did he create?
> Jan
- We're both from the NYC area. The reason we're "Litvaks" is because our patrilineal great-grandfather immigrated to the USA from supposedly the city of Slonim, which is now in Belarus but then was part of the Lithuanian culture-zone as far as Jewish subcultures are concerned. My father's mother's side of the family was probably from the same general region; sometimes it's hard to tell in my family which side different customs come from. The way i know that we're from there is (besides the geography) there's a ritual at the end of the holiday of Sukkot where you take willow branches and hit them against a chair, the ground, or some other object. When doing the ritual, you say /qo:l m@bas':e:r m@bas':e:r v@?o:me:r/ (/s'/ = sin, pronounced the same as /s/). When my father taught me and my brother to do it, he pronounced it [ke@l m@vasr= m@vasr= viejmr=], and the pronounciation of /o:/ as [ej] or [e@] is a distinguishing characteristic of a North-Eastern Ashkenazic accent. He also pronounces /o:/ as [ej] in the last word of the "Threefold Blessing": [SOlejm] for /SO:lo:m/. The rest of the time he has more-or-less an American Ashkenazic accent, with [ow] for /o:/. My brother and I collaborated on the short-lived conlang "ool-Nuziiferoi". We never got very far in it... what i remember of it was: All verbal roots are a CVCVC pattern, where certain diphthongs can count as V and certain affricates can count as C. For instance, _bobuht_ /bowbVt/ "to pour", or _tezar_ /tEzar/ "to be". "yes" was |ten| and "no" was |nyet| (because my brother liked the way the Russian word sounds), and you suffixed them: _tezar, uh tezar-nyet?_ = "to be, or not to be?" It had the same pronoun set as Rokbeigalmki (since, like many of its remnants, the pronouns were part of what i salvaged from ool-Nuziiferoi when i started Rokbeigalmki), except that the epicene vowel was /&/ instead of /V/. And the plural ones were formed differently. -Stephen (Steg) "tezar, uh tezar-nyet?" "wa'tezat, au nyeng wa'tezat?"