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Re: CHAT: False friends - echos from the mother tounge

From:Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 9, 2003, 14:54
>What would you do in the following case? Let us say, you have a root >"sat" and an inflectional ending "an"... would you avoid the remaining >"satan"? Just a question. Are you trying to avoid inclusion of negative >or unpleasant terms of your mother tounge into your conlang?
While the choice is ultimately yours with regards to your conlang, I myself take no notice of such issues as anyone working with natlangs frequently encounters such false cognates. Other than a quick "Hmm, interesting", I ignore them. E.g. I'm pretty sure that [bud_ha] exists in languages other than Pali and doesn't mean "enlightenment". In my Bez Dis'z the word "kod" [kod] means "food", the plural being "god" [god].* Of course, there are sometimes unexpected ramifications. Chevrolet's puzzlement of why their "Nova" didn't sell well in Latin countries. "Nova" -> "no va" -> "(it) doesn't go". *I'm presently considering changing the orthography of Bes Dis'z, which by chance would replace this false cognate with "~kod" [god]. Ever since it's creation, I've contemplated whether to indicate plurals (done via voicing the initial voiceless consonant) by changing the initial consonant or by prefixing a sign/symbol. _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

Replies

John Leland <leland@...>
John Cowan <jcowan@...>
michael poxon <m.poxon@...>