Re: alphabet-animal books

From: "Mike Ellis" <nihilsum@...>
Subject: Re: alphabet-animal books


> Joe Fatula wrote:
>
> >> ava "bird" (apyon "bee")
> >"apyon" seems really familiar.  Is it from Latin?
>
>   If not from Latin, then from some Romance language. I don't always
> remember what language I stole a word from.
I know the feeling...

> <lasut!>
??

> >A' is for álún (sheep)
> >D' is for d'ran (sky)
>
> Do those apostrophes represent something else in a non-ASCII-friendly
> orthography? The ones you see in Rhean are haceks.
A' represents capital á, etc.  I know the ASCII codes for the lower case
acute accent vowels, so I can punch them in on the keypad.  D' is the
d-hachek from Slovak, d' is the lower case form, which looks basically like
d'.  In Morgenón, there is an o with a double acute (like Hungarian), which
I wrote o" here, and there is also a u".

> >In light of the discussions on animal alphabets, I looked over the list
> >again.  Out of 33 letters, 11 are animals and 4 are plants.  That seemed
> >interesting to me.
>
>   If the letters were named long ago, they are more likely to be named
> after natural things or very simple inventions. I doubt many alphabets
have
> a letter called "hovercraft". You've got mostly natural things plus
castle,
> wagon, fencepost, boat, and barrel in there; all of those things have been
> around damn near forever.
The conculture to go with it is set in the bronze age, so "hovercraft" would
be right out.

>   All of the Rhean letters have names, but they aren't "words". The excuse
> for this comes from an excuse I made for the inconsistencies in Rhean
> orthography: that they took their alphabet, and its letter names, from an
> older and unrelated language. The letters came with their names, which
were
> Rheicised (?) but not translated.
Actually, the alphabet used to write Morgenón is a modified form of the
alphabetic system used for Tháxata (another conlang of mine), so the letters
do have names, though Morgenónized.  The traditional alphabetic set is
somewhere between English "A is for apple" and Hebrew "aleph".  Perhaps like
"alpha, bravo, charlie" is used.  They're not the actual _names_ of the
characters, but they can be used unambiguously to refer to them.

> (arep bita cedik c'ec'il dalet erze fia gemla g'al hakec' izin jorgo kofa
> k'ar lamud mam novun onz ökör pip res' sumko s'en taf uur üta vaklav wez'
> yud zida z'el)
Looks like a Turkic language - some of the best languages in the world are
there!