Re: Refining Minza

In the last episode, (On Wednesday 11 July 2007 12:43:36), Jeff Rollin wrote:
> In the last episode, (On Wednesday 11 July 2007 03:59:44), Herman Miller
>
> wrote:
> > Since the topic of revising languages has come up, I thought it might be
> > a good time to review some of my recent work on Minza. I've been keeping
> > a few different versions of the language, but eventually the plan is to
> > pick one of them and incorporate any features from the other versions
> > that I prefer. The set of distinctive phonemes is probably one feature
> > of the language I can settle on without much trouble, so I'll start with
> > that.
> >
>
> Why not consolidate some of those changes into different dialects, instead?
> You could also have them make small grammatical changes, or changes that
> depend on sociolect, e.g. extending the use of perfect tenses to cover all
> past tenses in speech, or by lower class (Minzans?), as in French.
>
> HTH
>
> Jeff
I know I keep banging on and on about Finnish, but if you're going to create
dialects based on these variants, you may be interested to know it goes to
the extreme of having a ban on clusters at the beginning and ends of words in
most dialects, and no such restriction in the Southwest. This is so
thoroughgoing that the somewhat artificial standard language doesn't even
include them except in foreign loans (and then only recently in spoken
varieties), even although the standard language is in part based on the
dialect of Helsinki, which is in the Southwestern initial-cluster area.

HTH

Jeff
--
"Please understand that there are small
European principalities devoted to debating
Tcl vs. Perl as a tourist attraction."

                            -- Cameron Laird