Re: Worthwhile Engelang Goal

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@A...>

> wrote:
> A lang where you can breathe through the nose
> while speaking would be fun, too. ;-)
And Tom Chappell replied:

<<
If you create or find one, be sure to let David J. Peterson know.
 >>

Oh, this reminds me: I gave my talk this past Tuesday.  It went
well, I think.  Regarding the things I was asking about on the
list:

(1) I presented Tom Breton's AllNoun as an engelang, just because
you can pretty much get from the title how it's an engelang.  But
the other examples that people gave were good ones.  And, you
know, I never thought of Toki Pona, or Dublex, or my own languages
Kelenala and KNSL, all of which are connected to the idea of building
a language from a set list of words.  That is, indeed, very engelangy.

(2) Thanks so much for all the words for "fire" and "water"!  After
compiling them all, I took some (not all--there were too many
contributions) and broke them down into two lists.  The first list
was a list of words for "water" and "fire" that could be used to claim
that conlangs used sound symbolism extensively.  The generalization
was this:

(a) Words for "water" will contain a liquid/glide (specifically, /
l/, /r/,
/w/ or /j/).

(b) Words for "fire" will contain a fricative, often voiced, often
coronal.

Based on the first list, these generalizations were easy to pick up on,
and all the students saw it pretty quickly.

The next list, though, I listed words for "fire" and "water"--some from
different languages by the same author--where, for the most part,
neither of these generalizations held.

In retrospect, what I *should* have done was separate languages
out where the vocabulary was created by feel, and where the
vocabulary was created using a random word generator.  Obviously,
the latter shouldn't count--unless roots were randomly generated
but then hand-selected by feel.  Either way, though, it's easy to
show that even conlangers who create vocabulary by feel don't
regularly fall into specific patterns.

Though, another idea I'm having too late is showing where a given
conlanger creates their *own* sound symbolism.  So, in English
we have:

glimmer
shimmer
glint
gleam
sheen
shine

etc.  That doesn't seem very universal.  I'm sure that we've done
similar kinds of things.  I can think of one pattern in one of my
languages, Sathir.  Let me see if I can find some words:

twaja "sky"
twajes "white"
tweja "moon"
Saja "heavens (literary word for the sky)"
jeZin "fire"
aZan "cloud"
oZoo "fog"

All these words have to do with brightness or whiteness, and
all have some sort of palatal in them (and a lot have that /tw/
phone).

Anyway, have any others done things like this?  Or perhaps a
better question: Those who have done this (intentionally or
unintentionally), would you care to share?  The lecture's done
with, but it'd still be cool to hear about.

P.S.: A language you could speak while breathing through your
nose?  How useful!  That's a great idea!  (A spoken language,
presumably.)  I wonder if it could be done...

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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