On Mon, 2 Jun 2003 16:55:49 -0400, makeenan <makeenan@...>
wrote:
>Hey!
>
> The work on speedtalk is progressing slowly and carefully.
Good to hear there's progress!
> It occured to me that Speedtalk will sound a lot like Heinlein's Martian.
> The beings that lived on Heinlein's mars appeared in several of his
> stories. He always described their langauage as sounding like a
> rhinocerous making love to a tin shed. Sadly, he never gave anything else
> on the language.
Not quite true. Besides similar vague comments, we know that
* humans can pronounce the language close enough for Martian comprehension
* 3 Martian names are given (Gekko, G'kuro, K'boomch)
* at least some questions begin with a question symbol
* there is a vocative symbol
> This project is at least getting me an education in X-sampa.
I still don't know X-SAMPA, but at least I can read the chart now.
> One place where I'm deviating from Heinlein is in numerals. his Speedtalk
> used base 36 counting. I'm not.
Why not?
> He also used numbers to diferentiate the meanings.
> For example 'Deer' had a different meaning than 'Deer2' I'm still going
> to do this but I decided the solution to my problem (How would you say
> two deer and be clear?)is to have two sets of numerals. One set for
> ordinal and cardinal numbers and the secondary set for differentiating
> meanings.
> The secondary numerals go up to nine but have a different meaning
> depending on whether they precede or follow the word. This will give an
> extra twenty possible meanings for each sound!! I'm projecting a
> vocabulary of 50,000 some-odd words.
If 9 meanings is enneasemy, I wonder what the word for 20 meanings is? My
greek is not too good. Question: when the numeral occurs between words, how
do you tell if whether it follows the previous sound or precedes the next
one?
> I made my first sentence/word in the language today: gWNZ_R.
> (Translation: What does he do?) Try this one on for size if you know
> x-sampa. :) Vowels are coming later!
>
> The questions I alluded to are how do you do an implosive and an
> ejective? I can guess but I'd rather know.
I'm self-taught when it comes to pronouncing implosives and ejectives, so
I'd better not say.
Jeff
> -Duke