> From: Michael Potter <MaxForwrd2@...>
> Subject: Re: CHAT: living conditions/conditionally Re: Miscellaneous
Nonsense
>
> artabanos@MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU writes:
>
> > I've always wondered about the distribution of this phrase -- "chest of
> > drawers".
> > My mother uses it, but I've always used "dresser" or "bureau". Are
there
> > any
> > dialects this is associated with?
>
> I've never heard anyone born in Tennessee use the word "bureau" in that
> context :)
Hehe. I'm born in Tennessee. My parents (not born in TN) used the word
"bureau" but I use 'dresser' exclusively for all the furniture in this
thread.
> From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: [wolfrunners] Languages & SF/F (fwd)
[quoting someone else, I think]
> My Russian teacher really tried to impress on us that you can't always
> directly translate words. For an example, she would write Russian words
> up on the board and give the English "equivalent". *Then* she would tell
> us what the word *really* means--all the connotations and nuances that
> come from being a Russian. Direct translations are nearly impossible.
An interesting book on this kind of thing was Anna Wierzbicka's "Semantics,
Culture, and Cognition" (and a couple other books that our library has by
her). "Direct translations" in the sense of 'a word for a word' mayn't be
possible, but she manages to do a sort of "source-code" comparison between
different "folk concepts" of ideas with her 'natural semantic metalanguage'.
> From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
> Subject: Re: Conlangs in History
>
> But I just wonder... has anybody come up with writing systems
> (conlang-related or otherwise) that don't follow a character-based system?
The reduced version of Daimyo script is basically character-based, but the
elaborate form theoretically would be glyph-based (er,...) _something_ like
... well, it'd remind me somewhat of Maya with its elaborately-decorated
faces, which might be arranged linearly or perhaps pictorially...
> My third English-transliterating system actually uses a rough system of
> constructing a single symbol for consonant clusters, and writes the vowels
> as "accent marks" over the consonant symbols.
My current conlang's "ancient/classical" phase had a consonantary script,
albeit without vowel marks. Later stages borrowed vowels from the Latin (or
possibly the Greek at a late stage).
> From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: [wolfrunners] Languages & SF/F (fwd)
>
> > << someone wondered why sf writers don't use
> > constructed/extrapolated languages more often in their works (though
the
> > question applies to fantasy, too). You know--future versions of major
> > languages today, or creolized variants, word-borrowings, etc. >>
> >
> > Anyone ever read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn? Sure, Mark Twain got
away
> > with that sort of language play, but he's not competing in today's
market.
>
> Well, there are ways of suggesting dialect without getting *that* extreme.
Or, or, you could end up like James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_ ! >:)
> From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> Subject: Re: Conlangs in History
>
> > never having to wonder "what the heck is 'agenothree'?"
>
> I wonder - is that /edZnoThri/ or /edZEnoTri/? And why didn't they just
> use the shorter "Nitric" for "Nitric acid"? Of course, if they had
> stuck with a corruption of HNO3, it seems that it would've been
> corrupted further, after thousands of years, perhaps down to something
> like /edZTri/ or /edZTi/.
Except "agenothree" isn't really much of a corruption.
But, uh, I never read that book, nor a lot of others in the series (and the
ones I have, their names I couldn't remember offhand).
*Muke!