Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey

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On Wednesday 06 April 2005 21:45 CEST, Patrick Littell
wrote:

 > On Apr 6, 2005 2:33 PM, David J. Peterson
<dedalvs@gmail.com <mailto:dedalvs@...>> wrote:
 > And (and this is important) children
 > > actually do learn Georgian.  As far as I'm concerned,
 > > if a child can learn Georgian, *anything* is possible.
 > > ;)

Hehe. Georgian must be perverse from what I heard about it
here, but I didn't know its morphology is *so* difficult.

 > I agree with David.  After all, by the first grade the
 > kids presumably know how to *speak* their language,
 > although in some seriously polysynthetic languages it
 > seems that the *most* complex constructions might not be
 > mastered until the ages of ten or eleven.

OK. Maybe children would be, say, 7, 8 years old in their
first year? Over here, children usually go to school from 6
or 7 years on, depending on whether you're born before or
after July 1st. Being born in August, I was 7.

 > I'm not all that familiar with the McGuffey Readers, but
 > from the name it seems like their purpose it to teach
 > kids to read.

Exactly.

 > By the age of seven, they certainly have a
 > good grasp of their spoken language, even if it's not
 > suitable for formal oratory yet.  Is the written language
 > is basically the same language as the spoken one?

I guess written language is as often a bit more formal and
conservative. But basically, I agree. I remember myself not
understanding why I have to learn about grammar at school
when I can speak my L1 already quite properly. And compared
to English, German syntax is due to declension and
conjugation of nearly anything more difficult than English.

 > One thought: I've been learning Tzeltal, a Mayan language
 > of Chiapas, and the wonderful manual I've been reading
 > uses a somewhat different, slightly simpler orthography
 > than other works, or the "official" orthography if there
 > is one.  In it, multi-morpheme words are often broken up
 > and it's pretended that they're separate, independent
 > words.

That'd be a possibility, putting mid-dots or hyphens in
between, if not even spaces. Though usually, two same
sounds are reduced to one, with vowels getting an acute
accent. The combination is not necessarily pronounced
differently.

 > After all, we learn to
 > print a year or two before we learn cursive, and I don't
 > think it really hinders us. --

Hehe, there is no distinction between printed and
handwritten media because they're preindustrial.



On Thursday 07 April 2005 00:48 CEST, B. Garcia wrote:

 > True. Think about our own native languages and the
 > shortcuts people use when speaking it.
 >
 > What I present for Ayhan is the formal language.
 > Colloquially, they might tend to drop the
 > animacy/inanimacy, natural/unnaturalness affixes (but i'd
 > not gotte that far).

I already thought about changes in colloquial language. I
basically thought of simplifying the (in)animacy stuff
which I also have and fronting case markers. They're
articles in front of verbs anyway. Some phonetic reduction
and simplification of weird vowel clusters etc., et voilà,
a colloquial standard.



On Thursday 07 April 2005 01:42 CEST, Gregory Gadow wrote:

 > It might be instructive to look at a reader in an
 > agglutinative natlang. What would a Turkish primer look
 > like?

As long as the texts at the page Tim May gave the link to
include interlinears, it'd be worth to have a look at that.

Carsten

--
Edatamanon le matahanarà sitayea eityabo ena Bahis Venena,
15-A8-58-1-3-13-13 ena Curan Tertanyan.
» http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri

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