Re: Tatari Faran and Flames

----- Original Message -----
From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>

>> >Most of my time over the weekend was spent programming the lexicon
>> >search engine, which is capable of full regular expression searches on
>> >Tatari Faran orthography and definition bodies, can filter results by
>> >entry category and word type. I hope y'all will enjoy it. :-)
>>
>> The only problem with it is that when I search for "man," meaning adult
>> human male, it also gives me "woman" and "manage."  You might want to
>> fiddle
>> with that a little. Fiddle a little, diddle diddle.
>
> Hmm. That's what the little note at the bottom of the page was trying
> to say: if you wanted only "man" and not "woman" or "manage", you'd
> type "\bman\b" in the search field.
>
> Or is that too obscure?
I guess I didn't see it.

> Should I make the regular expression search an
> option, and default to a word-by-word search? I suppose the term
> "regular expression" would be unfamiliar to non-programmer types.
It is to me, and word-by-word would be more useful.

>> Another question:  why kill off Ebisedian entirely, such that you have a
>> new
>> language altogether?  I rather like the name Ebisedian.  Could it be
>> salvaged in some way?
>
> Well, I'm unhappy with Ebisédian [@\bi"s@\:dj@n] mainly because some
> of the features that got stuck into its foundations were put in out of
> my ignorance of conlanging at the time. It's rather hard to fix it
> without redesigning the whole thing from scratch. That has driven me
> to make Tamahí, an Ebisédian descendent; but that unfortunately did
> not get very far. So after some deliberation, I decided to port over
> the "core" of Ebisédian (which in case people can't tell is the case
> system which I love immensely :-P) and re-cast it in a Terran
> language. Hence Fara, hence Tatari Faran.
>
> Nevertheless, Ebisédian refuses to die, and I think people
> misunderstand me when I say that I'm moving on to Tatari Faran. What I
> mean by that is simply that I will now be focusing my conlanging
> energies on Tatari Faran rather than Ebisédian; but that doesn't mean
> that I'm deleting all Ebisédian files and throwing them away forever.
> As you can see for yourselves, Ebisédian is still alive and well in
> the Ferochromon section of my website. A con-world almost 20 years in
> making isn't going to disappear overnight. Ebisédian will certainly
> make its appearance in a future relay, to the detriment of all other
> participants and the chagrin of all onlookers, as well as the delight
> of the volcanoes of Fara.
I thought, erroneously, that you had abandoned it; when you said you were
inventing Tatari-Faran I assumed it was a replacement.  Also, when you said
that your vocabulary for T-F was limited, I wondered why you didn't import
words from Ebisedian.  I suppose it's because you have also restructured the
phonology, or now because you want to keep T-F Terran.

>> I guess they'll never count you a connie caught between the wall and the
>> Wyrlorf, Teoh! :)
(that was supposed to be "conie"--I just typed in my cat's name! :)

> Ahh, the delicious concultural questions this statement urges me to
> ask! :-) Googling upon which, I have discovered your veritable tale of
> Wyrlorf, with which I shall entertain myself in this otherwise dreary
> afternoon of problems at work which are not entirely my own
> responsibility. Ah, the joys of a software programming job.
AAAAAACK!!!  I can't believe I posted that!  It's unfinished, it's
unrefined, it's full of errors and inconsistencies, the ending is still not
revised!   Don't read it!  I'll take it off immediately.  I think I posted
it for a couple of friends and forgot about it.  How do you give password
admission to a website?

>> communally to each other is efficacious.  So let's turn flames into
>> furnaces
>> of creation, and not flame for flaming's sake.
> The volcanoes of Fara, in which churn the molten rock that has created
> the face of Fara---and indeed, 90% of the surface of the Earth, land
> and ocean floor alike---roar in agreement. It is not a pleasant day
> when they decide to let loose the deadly _karinaras_ [ka"4ina4as], the
> pyroclastic flow (Fr. _nuees ardentes_), an incandescent mixture of
> hot gas and hot volcanic debris travelling at speeds up to 160 km/h
> that levels all things within its reach. Much preferred is the slow
> eruption of basaltic lavas, or the spectacular lava fountains thereof,
> the lava flows of which the _san muras_ (*) sculpt into their bizarre
> but fascinating lava art.
Which I take to be an unusually good retort to a common listserv flame.  :)

> (*) _san muras_: lit. "grey people", a term referring to the so-called
> lava artists of Fara, who spend and risk their lives around erupting
> volcanic vents, scooping up molten lava from active lava flows and
> painting it onto their stone canvases, on which the lava solidifies
> into indelible obsidian strokes. Covered with dust and ash, and
> scorched by the intense heat of their environs, they truly are the
> _san muras_, the grey people. But I digress.
:)

Sally

Reply