OT: (was Re: Historical Linguistics Question)

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:34:37 -0700, Jonathan Chang <zhang23@...>
wrote:
>
>on 9/21/05 11:36 AM, R A Brown at ray@CAROLANDRAY.PLUS.COM wrote:
>
>><...> Using previous
>> Portuguese-Vietnamese dictionaries, he wrote a
>> Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which was printed in Rome in
>> 1651, using his spelling system.
>>
>> This BTW explains why the Vietnamese orthography is not a one-to-one
>> phonemic mapping - it reflects the pronunciation of the language about 4
>> centuries ago. Still not as bad as English or French whose orthographies
>> reflect their languages as spoken some 7 or 8 centuries ago   ;-)
>
>LMAO
>
>Hehe, ... ::waves to all his colleagues & friends, esp'ly Komrade Yitzik &
>Mr. Miller::
>    yeah, I am still here on this here List - just havn't been "active"ly
>Conlangin' as of this date...
>
>    ... been too busy with writing for www.boheme-magazine.net (GO THERE &
>HAVE FUN & SUPPORT IT if you can/wish) and RealLife caca (health and money,
>as usual). My health is poor but stable and I am so poor that I am indebted
>to the Poor Church Mice... otherwise I am ok.
I hope the Poor Church Mice gave you a better interest rate than I got.

(posted via web interface)
--
Jeff

>
>--
>
>Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger
>
>
>    Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
>leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
>orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
>warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...
>
>
>"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
>title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
>_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_
>
>                "We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes,
>                to find each other." - Jose Saramago
>=========================================================================