Re: Characters (was: Nice comment, Adam! (was: beautiful scripts))

At 03:17 2001-10-16 -0400, Adam Walker wrote:

>A related  question:  Those of you who have conalngs with bizarre
>phonologies (or no "phon"ology), what do you do with foreign names?  I mean
>if you come upon the name "John" and your langage has no vowels or stops
>(just for example) what do you do?  What if your conlang is based on a
>different modality?  ASL (not a conlang, I know) either fingerspells or
>invents a new name.  TSL (Taiwan Sign Language) just uses the signs for the
>Chinese characters used to write the name.
Sahlab speakers would do one of three things:

1) Find out the meaning of the name and translate it

2) Invent a new name (descriptive or nickname)

3) Mangle it to fit the phonology

4) A combination of (2) and (3): mangle the sound into something which is
at least remotely meaningful in Sahlab.

Of course (1) is the sophisticated thing that the literati would attempt --
as often as not ending up with some folk etymology --, while (2) to (4) is
what the man in the street or the soldier in the field would do.

/BP 8^)>
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:bpX@netg.se (delete X)
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