Re: Conlang Typology Survey

On Fri, 23 May 2003 09:09:05 -0400 John Cowan <cowan@...>
writes:
> known as simply "the Y".)   The now-insulting "Hebe" originated
> among
> the (mostly Jewish, at the time) writers of the professional stage
> newspaper _Variety_ as a parody of this.  Another parodistic form
> The Imperials are decadent, 300 pound   John Cowan
> <jcowan@...>
-

And now there's Heeb Magazine, the self-styled "new jew review" (yay for
rhyming!), which can be glimpsed in all its weirdness at
http://www.heebmagazine.com/ .
A few months ago a few friends of mine decided that if Jews wanted to do
the "take over a slur as an in-group pride marker" thing that African
Americans did with 'nigger'>'nigga', using "heeb/hebe" would sound better
than "kike".

ObConlang:
the "heeb"/"hebe" spelling alternation just gave me an idea...
let's say, Proto-HeebeLang (PHL) had a system whereby one gender (let's
assign it as male), had lengthened final vowels, while the other gender
(now female) had a short vowel, followed by an echo of that vowel:
so:
*heb /heb/ = 'fellow in-group member' (abstracted root)
heeb /he:b/ = 'male fellow in-group member'
hebe /hebe/ = 'female fellow in-group member'
*goy /goj/ = 'not a member of the in-group' (abstracted root)
gooy /go:j/ = 'male not a member of the in-group'
goyo /gojo/ = 'female not a member of the in-group'

But then, a vowel shift kicks in where final echoed vowels merge back, or
fall away with compensatory lengthening, leaving HeebeLang with the
following pairs:
heeb /he:b/ = 'male fellow in-group member'
hebe /he:b/ = 'female fellow in-group member'
gooy /go:j/ = 'male not a member of the in-group'
goyo /go:j/ = 'female not a member of the in-group'

So each male/female pair is now spelled differently, but pronounced the
same.

Somehow i get the feeling something like this happened in English, but i
can't think of any examples... "comedian" and "comedianne" are pronounced
differently...


-Stephen (Steg)
 "dos iz nit der šteg!"

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