Re: many and varied questions

  Etak manifold and vareidly queries:

>   Firstly, I'm inventing a syllabery for my conlang,
>and I've run into a couple of problems.  The
>romanization of my conlang has capitals, but my
>syllabery doesn't.  Does anyone have any suggestions
>as to how to form capitals, preferably without using
>bigger letterforms because my letters are already kind
>of big.
Unless you have some specific reason for adopting this, you don't
really need capitals. At the inception of my lang, Géarthnuns (which
I started in high school), I, too, automatically assumed I'd need
capitals, since there's a mishmash of Roman-derived, Greek-derived,
Arabic-derived, and indigenous letters. That wasn't working for me,
so then I went to a diacritic marking for proper nouns and begnning
of sentences (how original). It seemed so forced. Abandoned it.
Géarthnuns has been capital-free for years and years, and there's no
problem reading or identifying proper nouns. I *do* capitalize when
romanizing, though. Too, capitalizing in a syllabary sounds weird.

>    Another thing I'm wondering about is that my
>Romanization has different letters for 't' and 'd',
>'s' and 'z', and the other plosives and fricatives in
>my language, but the native syllabery doesn't because
>plosives and fricatives can only be voiceless at the
>beginning of words and so are automatically read that
>way.  My question, do you think this will make
>transliterating stuff into my syllabery overly
>difficult and/or confusing?
Romanization is to facilitate language X's pronunciation of words by
those not fluent in the native script. I find the romanization of
Russian rather unappealing and the romanization I came up with for
Géarthnuns (with "kf", "kw", "zç", "dh", "rh", and "öi" where single
letters are used in the native script, and a host of diaereses 'til
ya puke) an utter eyesore. But hey, they work. The aesthetics, if
that's what you're worried about, of the syllabary should take
precedence, IMHO, not the romanization.

>    Also, what verbal mood is the English word 'might'?
>  I've been translating the Babel text, and translated
>'lest' as 'because we might' but than realized that I
>needed a new verbal mood and didn't know what it was
>called.
Techy (/tEtSi/) question since "might" straddles between the
indicative (whose usage the OED says is on the wane) and the
subjunctive. Your lang's results may/might (see?) vary.

>    And lastly I have a not really conlang related
>question which I've been wondering about.  In French,
>as I understand it, you generally use the imperfect of
>'to be' because whatever was is still being.  But what
>do you do if you are talking about someone who has
>died, and thus, has stopped being?
Key to the imperfect is that in the speaker's mind, at the point in
the past being discussed, the action's beginning or end has no
relevance. That can translate into English as something
continuous/progressive:

Je lisais ce livre, quand le téléphone a sonné.
I was reading that book when the phone rang.

something repetetive in the past:

Quand j'étais jeune, je lisais ce livre.
When I was young, I used to read that book.

or:

Je lisais ce livre quand j'étais jeune, mais je ne le fais plus.
I used to read that book when I weas young, but I don't do that anymore.

Other interpretations in English are possible, but it is not
(necessarily) a connection to something still going on. Hence,
imperfect is perfectly acceptable with regard to dead people:

Chaque soir, mon mari lisait le journal en fumant sa pipe .
Every evening, my husband would read the newspaper while smoking his pipe.


Kou

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