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?
Kash:  lacking plain voiced stops, and with only 5 vowels [a e i o u] , they
would have a little trouble with John (or Adam, or Roger)-- so these would
come out in speech as can [tSan], atam or etem [EtEm], racar.  A name like
Herman would be a problem, since -rC- metathesizes, so hembran [xEmbran].
In written form, names could be set apart in quotes or something, spelled
out correctly, with little diacritics to indicate a voiced C or stress, but
not everyone would get them right even so.

Gwr:  they have fun with names.  The language is tonal and monosyllabic,
with very limited final consonants-- h N ? w y= [j]-- but otherwise more
phonemes than Kash.  John would be dZaN; Adam æ/æh/æ? d@N,  Walker wa/O:  kr
(syllabic r as in US); Roger  la(h,?) dZr, Mills mi lih/ mi li si.  There
would be a "correct" version with tones corresponding to the original stress
pattern, to be used in the person's presence; but also an alternative
version if possible, by changing the tones or finals around to create an
insulting, obscene or humorous phrase. (Transparent names like Mills or
Walker might be translated, especially if there were more amusing tonal
homonyms.) They certainly do this with Kash names (they don't like them;
they don't really like any foreigners at all and would be quite perplexed by
us Earthlings.)  I don't have enough Gwr vocab to give any examples, but
it's something to keep in mind as I work on it.