Re: Elomi!

Taka Tunu wrote:
> Just combine the foreign word X with another word explaining what it is: Person
> X, Country X, City X, Fruit X, etc. Things get pretty clear that way.
>
> Natural languages with "poor" phonologies have had centuries to consider that
> and their speakers still can express and use foreign words--some of them even
> broadcast TV shows abroad! :-)
Every language has difficulties of this sort; English speakers have
trouble with German ch, ö, and ü sounds for instance, and phonotactic
problems with names like Zbigniew Brzezinsky [sp?]. But the situation of
a language without native speakers is a bit different. In that case a
speaker of one language is trying to understand a name from a third
language through the intermediate language which has a more limited
phonology. This situation would benefit from having a more explicit set
of guidelines for representing names.

One of my motivations for starting Minza was that I grew dissatisfied
with all the hacks for representing foreign names in Lindiga. So I
revised Lindiga to be a fictional language of the Azirian universe
(spoken by the human-like Yitha), and moved the "real-world" vocabulary
into Minza. But on the other hand it can be an interesting puzzle to
figure out names in a language like Japanese, which has some informal
rules for foreign names but nothing very consistent. So it might be an
interesting or useful exercise to come up with a list of some common
names (major cities, famous people, or whatever) represented in Elomi,
and see if they come out in a recognizable form.

Replies