Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

CHAT: (con)lang names

From:dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...>
Date:Saturday, November 25, 2000, 17:57
On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, And Rosta wrote:

> BTW, I have long thought that Tohono O'odham is just about the coolest > language name there is. It just doesn't sound like a language at all. > It sounds like the name of someone with a Japanese mother and an > Irish father. Who would think of naming a language Seamus Takahashi?
There's also Akimel O'odham, which is the language that Marcus is looking at right now in his field methods class.
> Other possible candidates for coolest lang name would be !Kung (etc.) > and "the Bzyb dialect of Abkhaz". I quite like Hixkaryana, too. And > Guugu Yimidhirr. And Wolof. And Twi. (Note that I'm talking cool names, > not just likeable ones like Malayalam.) > > Anyone have any other nominations? (I'll go through my Ruhlen > classification book when I get back to my other flat, to see if there > are any more ace names that haven't occurred to me.)
Well, my personal favorite is Tubatulabal (the first <u> is a high, central, unrounded vowel), a Uto-Aztecan language once spoken in the Kern River Valley of Eastern California, but I don't get around much. The name just rolls off the tongue (after about half an hour's practice).
> As for Conlang names, my votes provisionally go to Tsxaah ([ts^xaa] > with harsh voice, iirc; ^ is the coarticulation arc) and Namyuan > (because it's pronounced [D@bj@]).
Well, I'd have to stick with Tepa [ti-Ba]. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't use it :-). Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu