Re: CONLANG Digest - 18 Aug 2000 to 19 Aug 2000 (#2000-225)

On Sun, Aug 20, 2000 at 09:12:25AM +0000, Adam Walker wrote:
[snip]
> Which two Chinese langs?  Mandarin and Hokkien?
Yes.

> I'm living in Taiwan right now and working hard on my Mandarin.  I'm about
> to embark on learning Ho Lo Oe -- the local dialect of Hokkien.  And may try
> to add Hakka as well.
The particular flavor of Hokkien I speak is actually already beginning to
diverge from Taiwanese and mainland China Hokkien. It has somewhat changed
its "accent", as we call it (some of the tones have been modified), and
has assimilated many words from English and Malay. In fact, I recall that
my grandparents would "switch" to the "more authentic" Hokkien when
speaking with other old folk who still retained the "original version" of
Hokkien, but with me & my parents' generation they spoke the local
version. When I was young, sometimes I couldn't understand the "authentic"
Hokkien; although now, I can pick it up easier.

[snip]
> Tonal langs ROCK!
Yep... unfortunately, I know them too much by "gut feeling", with not
enough grammatical basis, so I'm having trouble importing ideas about
tones into my conlang... But perhaps I shouldn't push it too far, because
so far, I have both tone and stress accent in my conlang, plus vowel
length, a complex system of inflection, and probably way too many
consonants than I can handle... :-)

Maybe I should drop some of this stuff and leave it to descendant
conlangs, which I plan to work on after I get the current one into a
satisfactory state. My conculture is situated in a fictional universe that
subdivides into three sections, and in its history, there were long lapses
in the communication between these sections. During these long lapses, the
language would evolve in its own ways; so I plan to explore three
divergent paths of language evolution and see what I can come up with. :-)


T