Re: Ebisedian tutorial

On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 11:25:13AM -0700, JS Bangs wrote:
> H. S. Teoh sikyal:
[snip]
> I found this tutorial quite clear and easy to understand. In fact,
> explained this way, I fail to see how people could find these concepts
> difficult in the first place--but perhaps I'm prejudiced by the fact that
> I've sketched out conlangs with very similar systems.
Well, perhaps if you had first attempted to tackle the Ebisedian reference
grammar, which is formidably technical, you'd have found it very difficult
to understand. :-)

> Incidental remarks: I'd always disliked Ebisedan based on its unconsciably
> ugly ASCII representation scheme, but seeing it in the PDF as it was
> "supposed" to look, I found it quite pleasant. What a surprise!
To be frank, I myself loathe the ASCII representation, because using "0"
and "3" as vowels is extremely ugly (even to me!), not to mention
repeating vowels to indicate length, and using apostrophes in place of
acutes. I mean, how much uglier can one get with words like _3K00'i_, or
_3bis33'd0_?

I sure am glad I wrote that ASCII-orthography-to-LaTeX program. That
certainly saves a lot of eyesores.

> I also
> assumed that the graphs you used for vowels were more or less IPA values,
> except that there is one letter that looks like a lower-case omega on my
> screen, which is not an IPA character. How is that pronounced?
Actually, _0_ (slashed O in the PDF) is pronounced [A], and _w_ (omega in
the PDF) is pronounced [u"] (rounded close front vowel).

Hmm, I think I should include IPA transcriptions in that document. Just so
people don't have to deal with that formidable reference grammar just to
know how to pronounce simple words. :-)


T

--
"You are a very disagreeable person." "NO."