Re: Maggel

En réponse à Carsten Becker :


>Hello :)
>
>You guys are quite often talking about "Maggel". I'm on the list for
>about 3/4 year now, I could figure out from what you wrote that Maggel
>might be a conlang which maybe invented by someone from this list
>(Christophe I guess), and that Maggel is near 100% pure evil concerning
>the weirdness of languages.
That may be correct ;)) . Indeed, Maggel is my invention. The Maggel the 
list knows is actually the second incarnation of an entity I invented more 
than ten years ago, when I discovered and got interested in Irish Gaelic. 
Not so long ago I found the notes I had kept of the language, and decided 
to rework on it, while introducing some evil ideas I had about how weird 
you can make a language ;)) . My goal with Maggel is to create a language 
that is extensively irregular, but still has some regular phenomena (but 
still not obvious ones :) ) in order to lure you in a false sense of 
security as to your understanding of the language. In many ways, the 
language is rather European-like, but twists its Europeanness in ways even 
Celtic languages never dreamed of doing ;)) .

>  I just haven't found out yet where I can see
>its grammar'n'stuff. Where can I find it?
The archives of the list are the place for that. I haven't put anything on 
the web because I begun reworking my notes (the language doesn't change. 
It's just that my notes are so chaotic I cannot keep on working on it 
satisfactorily :( ). But Real Life(TM) keeps interfering and I can't find 
the time and courage to work on it currently :(( .
_______________________________________________________________________
En réponse à Danny Wier :


>I Googled and didn't find anything either except references to 'Maggelity'.
Check the archives of the list and you'll find much more :) .

>Christophe, I believe, is the inventor of Maggel, and it's one of the group
>of conlangs known as frankenlangs: these are conlangs that are especially
>grotesque in some way. (Klingon is the most famous of this class.) With
>Maggel, it's an extremely unpredictable and incongruent orthography.
Not only. Maggel is irregular to the extreme, uses familiar word types in 
very unfamiliar ways (for instance, Maggel's numbers aren't divided into 
cardinals, ordinals, etc... but in declarative, combined and distributive 
forms :) ). Its adjectives have strange agreement patterns, it lacks 
derivations that we find obvious and grammaticalises relationships that we 
find far-fetched, its verbal system (which I haven't worked in detail on 
yet) makes Basque, Georgian, Gaelic and German look simple in comparison, 
and its phonology is so complicated I haven't been able to find out what is 
phonemic and what's not in Maggel (so I describe everything phonetically :) ).

>  It's a
>parody of English in a way.
I was more influenced by Irish Gaelic when I invented Maggel. That's why 
Maggel is written in a mutated form of the Uncial style of the Latin 
alphabet, which features only 17 letters (which makes it easy to transcribe 
it in the Latin alphabet, with a one-to-one letter correspondance), 
literally thousands of ligatures, and an Arabic-like system of connecting 
and unconnecting letters, all that when the spoken language features 
something like 90 phonemes (take or leave 20 ;) ).

>The name itself isn't even pronounced how it's written. And I can't remember
>how it's pronounced.
Actually, its name is pronounced *completely* regularly according to the 
spelling rules of the language. However, it's an exception ;) . |maggel| 
(the Maggel alphabet doesn't feature capitals) is regularly pronounced 
[m@'gE:l]. If you want an irregular noun, take rather |imuohf|: cow. It's 
pronounced ['mbu:]. Don't even try to analyse the word's orthography, it's 
completely off the pronunciation. And it's not the worse example ;) .

Maggel is slowly getting a conculture too :) . The speakers of Maggel are 
known as the Pictics. Any resemblance with the Picts may or may not be 
coincidental ;))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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