Re: Q & X

-----Original Message-----
From: Tero Vilkesalo <teronpostilaatikko@...>
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU <CONLANG@...>
Date: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 7:01 AM
Subject: Q & X


>Hi to all!
Hello!

>I am new on the list. I followed your discussion here a little in the
summer
>and then again in december. This really is a most interesting forum!
I know.  Despite the fact that I can't figure out over 50% of the messages
that pass through this list, I'm still hooked.  <G>

>My name is Tero Vilkesalo and I am a 20-year-old boy from Helsinki,
Finland.

Greetings from a 21-year old female from Houston, Texas or South Korea, take
your pick.

>BTW, has anybody of you changed your surname and invented the new name
>yourself? I have. However, the reason was simple: I wasn't really grown up
>to my former surname, which was Kukkonen. Kukko means 'rooster' or 'cock'
>(only the animal!!) in Finnish. -nen is the a very common ending in
>surnames. My new surname, Vilkesalo, is purely Finnish as well, just like
my
>roots. I did have a thought of how foreign people would pronounce it. This
>surname really didn't seem too difficult. Or what do you say?
Depends on the language.  :-p  A Korean might render it (I'm guessing as to
the "real" pronunciation) Birukessalo.

My surname is "i", rendered in English as "Lee."  After looking at my
half-German boyfriend's surname (Betzwieser) I decided I liked nice and
simple.

>Something about articles... If I would ask you anything, it would probably
>be "should I try use the articles even if I couldn't care less?" After
>having studied German 10 years I know remembering which of them should be
>used with different words is not the simplest task! OK, I could of course
>use the system of the language which I'm currently using. But I really
>haven't been interested in messing up with them...
<sigh>  Depends on what you're trying to do.  I tutor writing at Cornell
University (I'm a math major--and no, that's not a contradiction) and I see
*all sorts* of foreign-language-speakers screw up the English article
system, and who can blame them.

>And now to a real question. Which sounds do you write with the letter Q or
X
>in your a priori conlangs with Latin alphabet? What different sounds do
they
>reflect in those languages of the world that use Latin alphabet? (What is Q
>in Greenlandic???)
Chevraqis has its own alphabet, but I use "q" to transliterate /x/ (ch as in
German Bach).  Since English-speakers associate "q" with /k/ or /kw/ I
thought it wouldn't be too farfetched.  The real reason, though is that the
name of the conculture nation is Qenar, and after some 8 years working on
that conculture, it's too much a headache to change certain names that
contribute to the "feel" of the thing.  (Originally I was going to use "q"
for the tensified/glottalized version of /k/, but I dropped tensified stops
from the phonology.)

Yoon Ha Lee
http://yhl.freeservers.com