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

Herman Miller wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 03:17:18 -0400, Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...>
>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.
>
>Chispa has no nasals, "h", or "l", so representing the name "Herman Miller"
>is a bit of a problem. I suppose "Urwa Wiru" is about as close as I could
>get, and even that sounds distinctly foreign to Chispa phonology.
>
>I often sidestep the issue of representing my name by adopting a name in
>the other language (Yietazai in Chispa, Talanor in Galtani Elvish, Khilnik
>in Tirelhat). "Herman" rarely sounds good in any language. "John" happens
>to work well in Tirelhat (Xhan or Xhon, depending on dialect), but it'd be
>tricky in Chispa (Ch'at? Ch'aru?).
It'd just occured to me that the name "John" could work a bit fun in
Tairezazh. They'd almost certainly convert it into what romanizes as
"Dzhohn". Since the /h/ character is mute in Tairezazh, this'd normally be
realized as [dZOn], but I can easily imagine would-be knowledgeables
struggling to put in that [h] there, since keeping the original
pronunciation of foreign names is considered nifty in Tairezazh society, and
people of some education know, more or less, what sound the {h} letter
normally signifies.

Herman'd be turned into {Herman}, pronounced [Ernan], note the [-n-].

Andreas {Andréas} works well phonetically, but looks like the accusative of
a feminine name. Johansson is a nightmare - {Juhanson} [u'ansOn]?

                                                      Andreas

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