Re: the world needs another English like I need another...

En réponse à Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>:

>
>  I'm doing something similar with mine, but it's not going to be all
> that extreme - I'm taking a bunch of ideas from Danish and French
> orthography and throwing a touch of English in for flavour. There's a
> phonemic glottal stop that's not indicated (except in rather rare
> cases), unmarked vowel length and stress, D switches to eth a lot, T to
> thorn, and after certain approximants, the final consonant becomes
> silent. That sort of thing. Vowels remain fairly loyal to their values,
> but I'm gonna apply some chaos to them once my language is set.
Hehe, somewhere in my notes is a language of mine that was inspired by
the "chaotic" look of Irish Gaelic when I discovered it (I was 17, and had no
idea of the principles underlying the Irish orthography). It had, as far as I
recall (my memories of it are not much, and I have to look very far to find my
notes :)) ), a vaguely Celto-English grammar, using for instance initial
mutations à la Irish (and irregular plurals like it) and lots of auxiliaries à
la English. But its main characteristics was its nightmarish orthography. It
used the Irish alphabet to represent more sounds that even English has :)), and
used a lot of digraphs, trigraphs and even tetragraphs, each of them having at
least two possible different values, with only a limited possibility to infer
the pronunciation from the writing and absolutely no possibility to guess the
orthography from the sound :)) . Needless to say, those multigraphs were
everything but sensible :)) .

Actually, its grammar was not bad, very naturalistic (maybe a little too full
of irregularities, but that's what the language was for :)) ). Maybe I should
revive someday this attempt at a hoaxlang :)) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.