Dipping my toe in the water

Newbie alert!

I've been following the various discussions for a couple of months now, so I
thought it was probably time to stick my oar in (continuing the watery
metaphor).
To introduce myself: my name's Jonathan Knibb, i'm a junior doctor from
Nottingham, England, and for the last four years have spent substantial
chunks of time on my (single) conlang, which is currently in a phase of
rapid expansion and probably needs to stabilise a bit before I start posting
much about it. (But I think you're going to like it :P )  Incidentally,
given the subject of most of the discussion lately, my accent is largely
based on RP (Oxford education, doncherknow) but with occasional Midland
features of which I'm fiercely proud :) (e.g. different vowels in 'grass'
and 'part', some glottal stops, palatalised /nj/ and /lj/ ....)

Two questions for my first post.  Firstly: I've recently had to change my
conlang's name (owing to major phonological overhaul), and came up with
Telona as reasonably euphonic and representative of the language's
sounds/phonology.  It strikes me, though, that (probably not by coincidence
.... :) ) 'Telona' is rather similar to the names of certain other,
higher-profile conlangs, notably Tokana, Tepa and Teonaht (and perhaps
others that Dr. Freud is preventing me from remembering :) ).  Now I know
this is a slightly unusual thing to ask, but does anyone have any objection
to my using the name Telona for my conlang?  If so, now would be a good time
to know.

Secondly: (ObNatlang :) )

Christophe Grandsire a ecrit:
> French has another funny word: "ho^te", which means both "host" and
"guest".

IIRC, Czech 'host' means 'guest'.  I know that initial h in Cz. often
corresponds to initial g in Russian, so are these two words perhaps
ultimately cognate anyway?

Oh, hang on.  The Shorter Oxford says that Eng. 'host' < Lat. 'hospis,
hospit-' (meaning 'host'), but Eng, 'guest' < (Germanic) < Lat. 'hostis'
(enemy, stranger).  Does that mean that the French 'ho^te' is a pair of
homonyms, one from each of these roots?

Promising to get some AFMC info up ASAP,
Jonathan.

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