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Over the rivver and Throo the wuds

From:Mia Soderquist <tuozine@...>
Date:Thursday, October 15, 1998, 4:44
Matt Pearson wrote:
 If you really wanted
> to respell "through" in a way which conforms to the general norms of > English orthography, you'd probably have to spell it "throo" or "thrue". > > Hair-splittingly yours... ;-) > > Matt.
Oh, I vote for throo! I just love the look of it! The same sound is spelled "uu" or u-with-a-diaeresis** in Siidmak. I must be stuck on double vowels this year. On a completely unrelated note (Don't you just hate it when I change subjects in the middle of a post), I spent half of today thinking about a sign I saw in the window of a bicycle shop. In gigantic orange letters, it said "90 DAYS SAMEASCASH". I just glanced at it to start with, and it seemed to me that that last word didn't look like English at all, until I actually looked at the sign and read "same as cash". There wasn't enough room for the spaces. This got me to thinking about how difficult it might be for me to figure that out if English weren't in my top-5 best-known languages. It's weird on several levels. It might be hard to pull the words apart, but if I did get it apart, it is a rather odd expression in a literal sense. How is 90 days the same as cash? So, what does this mean to my conlanging? (a) It has me thinking about ea-luna again, a language where dividing compound words (or phrases, for that matter) in different places radically alters the meaning of the word/phrase...and the new division has a really good chance of being grammatically correct. (b) It had me considering how a language could be built so that it could be written without spaces, with obvious markers for where words begin and end. (c) It inspired me to think about idioms for Merahai and Siidmak. and (d) I started thinking about what "sameaskas" might mean in Siidmak. :) Mia ** Is that spelling right? I let my spell checker have a go at it...