Q & X

Hi to all!

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!

My name is Tero Vilkesalo and I am a 20-year-old boy from Helsinki, Finland.
It's been interesting to see how the Finnish language is being mentioned
here. If I have understood right, many think it's "cool" (in many ways...),
at least Tolkien who was influenced by it. If anybody of you wants to know
something about Finnish beyond the material you've got, I'll be happy to
help.

You can say I'm "bitten by the conlang bug". But I like many kinds of
creative work. Currently, and probably in the future as well, my primary
interest will be composing music, art music that is. I am a composition
student in the Sibelius Academy, which is the only music university in
Finland. That means somewhere in the future I might well be composing for
living. (That IS possible, at least in Finland, for the most distinguished.)

Anyway, I use reduced amount time to conlanging. I use this hotmail box only
for this list and I read it once or twice a week. (But perhaps more often in
the following days...) For any personal messages the address
tero.vilkesalo@siba.fi should be used.

There's not much to tell you about my conlang attempts. I'll tell you about
them as they make progress.

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?

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...

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???)

Q and X seem to me as some unused corners of the keyboard. We never use them
in Finnish, you know. We have ks for the x sound. It would be most
unattractive for me to use them in their historical ways. So in one of my
sketches Q was used for the deep throat sound, which is J in Spanish. (J
was, of course, used for something else.) X was used for the sh-sound. (I'm
not familiar with the correct marks yet...) I know this is used in Catalan
and somewhere in Latin America at least. The reason? Convenience.
Furthermore, they look neater than those kh and sh. (Kh weirdly always
brings to my mind Tolkien's orc language...)

Happy to enter this community of language freaks. : )

Cheers,

Tero
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