Re: Tatari Faran and Flames

On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 02:48:54PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
[...]
> >After lots of work over the weekend, I've finally got the Tatari Faran
> >webpage ready for public consumption. There's some brief info on the
> >con-world, and an updated phonology, grammar, and lexicon. It is all
> >here:
> >
> >http://conlang.eusebeia.dyndns.org/fara/index.html
>
> Awesomely imaginative, as usual, Teoh.  A people of fire in a volcanic
> world.
Thank you.


> >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? 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.


> 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.


> On another fiery (or should I say "furry"--or "froggy") note:
Technically, _anuran_. :-)


[...]
> I guess they'll never count you a connie caught between the wall and the
> Wyrlorf, Teoh! :)
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.


[...]
> 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.

(*) _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.


T

--
One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the internet
is that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying
the internet is reliable to the point of invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from
the article "Giving it all away"

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