european roots, etc.

> From:    Daniel44 <Daniel44@...>
> Subject: Uusisuom's influences
>
> Lithuanian = highly prized for its Indo - European roots. Many of its
words
> can be traced back to ancient India and the Sanskrit language.
The same can be said for almost all of the languages of Europe (except ...
Basque, Finno-Ugric languages like Finnish and Hungarian, and... what is it,
Maltese?). Of course, none of them, not even Lithuanian is 'derived' from
Sanskrit [ok, except probably Romany], though they share a common
derivation.

Anyway, I thought Lithuanian was 'prized' for its *endings*, not its roots
in particular?

> It is also worth mentioning that Uusisuom's grammar system is more similar
> to languages such as Urdu, many African language systems and other WORLD
> languages than to simply 'European' ones.
Well FWIW Urdu is also Indo-European (derived from Sanskrit, actually, in
the way that Lithuanian isn't), though I don't know what its grammar looks
like.

> From:    Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>
> Subject: Re: "y" and "r" (Uusisuom)
>
> You can order a cd of the pronunciation from the International
> Phonetics Association (www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html); I'm also sure
> that there are websites that have sound files for this chart. You
> could try searching from there.
There's a free SIL program called "IPA Help" that has sound files for most
of them.
You can see it at http://www.sil.org/computing/speechtools/ipahelp.htm

Apparently there's a web-based version too, but I haven't used it so I don't
know.

> From:    Padraic Brown <pbrown@...>
> Subject: Re: Uusisuom's influences
>
> >Finnish = one of the oldest modern languages in Europe;
>
> Oh?
Yeah, isn't Finnish first written in the 1500s?  Even Shakespeare's that
old.

(Yes, okay, nearly everybody's been speaking a language rather like what
their father spoke for as far back as forever, but if you're talking history
as in written records...)

> From:    Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> Subject: Re: "y" and "r"
>
> JOOC, then, where do things like the American Heritage Dictionary or the
> World Book Dictionary get their pronunciations?  Do they take an
> average of news anchor voices or something?  :-p
Possibly an average of dialects.
Of course, they can't get everyone's right.  AHD4's pronunciation key
<http://www.bartleby.com/61/12.html>, frex, marks the vowel in 'f[a]ther'
with one sign, 'pot' with another sign, and the vowel in 'caught, paw, for,
h[o]rrid, hoarse' with another.  But for myself I have one vowel in 'father,
pot, caught, paw', and another in 'for, horrid, hoarse'.

Plus their treatment of vowels before <r> is weird.  Either they have
different vowels than elsewhere or they do it for unexplained mnemonic
value, but they have, say, e-breve in 'pet' but â (a-circumflex) in 'care'.
I have, AFAICT, the same vowel in both, and while it may be longer in 'care'
because of the r's influence, it certainly isn't a-like.

Er, this has no relation to your question, I'm sorry.

     *Muke!
--
http://www.southern.edu/~alrivera/

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