Re: Is Microsoft conquering the world?! (Re: Orthographies with lotsa diacritics)

Marcus Smith wrote:

> Daniel Andreason wrote:
> >Yeah. The sentence "chim iti tvpa micha chi tvbi vt sv hopulhvli hoka"
> >was a real chore until I realized that the v's were vowels. :)
> That sentence shows a lot of the problems with the original Choctaw
> orthography.  All the inflections are written as separate words, long vowels
> and consonants aren't marked.  There should actually only be five words there:
>
> chimiti [probably with double t] tvpa micha [that's two morphemes, don't know
> why they weren't separated like the rest] chitvbivt [the first <i> should
> either be followed by <n> or be nasalized (non-phonemic distinction); probably
> needs a glottal stop between <iv>] svhopulhvlihoka.
I thought it looked strange! It looked far to isolating to my eye.
Thanks for clearing this up. Now I'm calm again. :)

> P.S.  How were the talks by Mithun and Corbett?
Great! Just great! I recommend anyone to go see them if they come
to a uni near you.

Mithun started her speech by saying "stop me if I'm talking to fast".
Then she spoke for an hour without breathing. She laughed and waved
her arms about and held a very interesting speech on if borrowing of
ergativity is possible. (Answer: Ergative markers spread through
contact, but the ergative category did not. <- not the whole truth.
If anyone's interested I can post the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth ;)

Corbett (or "Grev" as he was introduced :) was a very charming and
incredibly funny Englishman with the best accent who held two speeches.
One on "computation and typology" and one called "are personal pronouns
suppletive?". (And yes. "Personal pronouns are frequently suppletive
for number, and as such are one of the most common instances of
suppletion cross-linguistically", Corbett thought. :)

Daniel