Re: Babel text in Spanzhol

On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 03:59:54AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Shfanzhol is a language of North America about 1000 years from now.
So which is it - Spanzhol or Shfanzhol?  I see from the sample that
Sfanzhol would also be legal . . .


> This is not the final version.  Orthography is ad hoc, Spanish
> mostly, but h sh zh dzh are [h] [S] [Z] [dZ], v is labio-dental.
So <j> represents [x]?

> [1] Tsoa la siedzha aplava la mishma lenkua i lash mishmash pfalaplash.
No time to look at this in detail, but my initial response is
"cool!" :)  My immediate-post-initial response follows:

Affricativization (verbing weirds language!) of initial voiceless
stops ([t] -> [ts], [p] -> [pf]); that's interesting.  A response to the
English-speakers' aspiration of what are in native monolingual Spanish
unaspirated stops, perhaps?

I see poor intervocalic /d/ has continued its long slide into oblivion.
But other voiced intervocalic stops have lost their voice (<aplava, <lenkua>,
<pfalaplash>), which seems odd to me; I thought it usually went the other way.
I guess you're moving forward along a general devoicing trend, from e.g.
[g] to [G] (already there in modern Spanish) to [k] to [h] to zero?

I don't know where <siedzha> comes from; if <tierra>, it seems
a bit inconsistent with the rest of the shifts.  I'd expect <tsiela> or
maybe <tshela> or some such.

More later.

-Mark

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