Re: many and varied questions

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004 13:01:44 -0400, Etak <tarnagona@...> wrote:
>Hello!
Hello,
I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said in other
replies, but I have a few remarks ...

>   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.
In my syllabary for 'Yemls, I don't have capitals, although
I have symbols that _look_ like capitals, but represent
distinct syllables.

>   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?
I'm glad you brought this up. One of my long-standing problems
with 'Yemls is romanisation. Despite being ASCII-friendly, the
syllabary is hard to read -- even Christophe Grandsire, the
inventor of Maggel, said so, and he should know! So I've wanted
to come up with something to indicate pronounciation without
having to resort to a narrow phonetic transcription in X-SAMPA
(which is also hard to read). Anyways, I think I've more or
less settled on something after reading the replies to your
question.

>   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.
Pinning down the specific moods is another one of my long-
standing problems. Besides the indicative forms, I have one
other mood marker which is quite overloaded as to its usages.

I think "might" indicates possibility, and "lest" that
avoiding the possibility is desirable.

>   Thank you all for the many and varied answers to my
>many and varied questions which I hope to receive. :)
>---Etak
Thanks for the questions.

Jeff