Re: Q & X

At 6:09 pm -0500 8/1/01, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Tero Vilkesalo wrote:
>> Kukko means 'rooster' or 'cock'
>
>I wonder if _kukko_ and _cock_ are cognates?  I know that the Finns
>borrowed from the Germanic tribes long long ago, and maybe the other way
>around too.
And French has 'coq' - but IIRC it's one the words the Germanic Franks
bequeathed to the language.

[....]
>
>> 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?
>
>I doubt it would be too badly mutilated, assuming that the correct
>pronunciation is something like /vilkesalo/, altho most English-speakers
>would probably say something like /vIlk@salo/, I think, but that's not
>too far.  And English-speakers will mutilate the simplest of names.  :-)
Too true - I'd pronounce similar to Nik, with stress on the initial
syllable.  But now in Britain, most people seem intuitively to think "if
it's foreign, it's stressed on the penultimate" with consequent distortion
of so many names, e.g. the famous Italian 'Medici'  familt become M'deechy
:=(

I guess they'd say /vIlk@'sa:lou/  - bah!

[...]
>
>> 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?
In 'briefscript' (still unnamed) {x} has long been /S/ (i.e. English 'sh').
But {q} still hasn't settled down, so to speak.  One it was /tS/ (the _ch_
in _cheap_); for a short time it was the glottal plosive.  At the present
it is unassigned.

One language I began working on two or three years back had {x} as the
voiceless lateral fricative (Welsh _ll_, Nguni _hl_ ).  I didn't use {q}.

>>What different sounds do they
>> reflect in those languages of the world that use Latin alphabet?
I guess you're going to receive many answers.  But for me the most
interesting use of these two letters and of {c} (another 'troublesome'
letter) is to represent 'click' consonants in the Nguni languages (Zulu,
Xhosa, Ndebele & Swati) of southern Africa, where:

{c} is a dental click [a bit like English clicxk of annoyance written
as'tut-tut']

{q} is the retroflex click [sounds a like a cork being released from a bottle]

{x} is the lateral click [similar to the sound not infrequently made by
Brits who ride horses when urging their steeds on]

Anyway, welcome to Conlang, Tero!

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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