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.
The Tairezazhen usually keep the original spelling of foreign names, or if
the foreign language isn't written in the Maidzhen Klaish, translitterate it
fairly strictly. Highly educated people will often keep to the original,
foreign pronounciation, even if it violates Tairezazh phonlogy, while common
folks usually adopt a spelling pronounciation.

To complicate the later option, the Maidzhen Klaish include quite a few
letters that denote sounds that don't occur in Tairezazh, which often turn
up foreign words. Some, like the letters for /j/, /w/ and /h/, are usually
simply ignored, while others are read as the closest Tairezazh equivalent,
for instance the /x/ letter is popularly read as /k/.

Of course, there are also foreign names that've acquired a Tairezazhized
form - for instance, _Leias Kaishins_, founder of the Kesheazh Empire, is
known to Tairezazhen as _Lei Kaishin_.

                                                         Andreas

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