Re: Japanese (was an ol Conlang Post: "Borrowing Words")

In a message dated 2003:12:23 08:13:53 AM, hotblack@FRATH.NET writes:

>One Japanese creation I read about recently [hopefully not from this list,
>otherwise I'll look silly...] that I thought was quite cool (which may
>or may not be fictitious) is the word for a female ninja, |kunoichi|.
>
>(Hoping listserv wont mangle the unicode)
>
>Basically you take the kanji for woman, x, and dismantle it into pieces:
>
>the hiragana x |ku| +
>
>the katakana x |no| +
>
>the kanji x |ichi| ('one'),
>
>thus xxx = kunoichi.
>
>Any conlangs do stuff like *that*?
    I do believe Dublex (langmaker.com) does just that:

You can coin new Dublex words using the following techniques:

*   Simple compounding
*   Suffixing
*   Applying infixes
*   Coining phrases
*   Forming acronyms

Simple Compounding
The simplest method of word creation is simply to place a modifier before the
word being modified. Thus 'darg'+'vic' = 'dargvic', "road vehicle, car", and
'fon'+'sens' = 'fonsens', "sound sense, hearing". You can string together as
many compounds as is reasonable, as in 'lun'+'col'+'vic' = 'luncolvic', "lunar
wheeled vehicle, lunar rover". As a result, you can incorporate other people's
coined words into your own words.

Suffixing
A small set of Dublex words follow the word they modify. Most of these are
scalars, which are words that describe an end point on a scale, such as 'term',
"hot", and 'dens', "dense". So 'vattermmest', 'vat'+'term'+'mest', is "hot
water place, hot springs", and 'furtcisid' is 'furt'+'cisid', "acidic fruit",
which might refer to the lemon, lime or kumquat. All the scalars are marked in
the Dublex root-word dictionary. Five suffixes that aren't scalars are 'ses',
"female"; 'mas', "male"; 'ton', {augmentative}; 'let', {diminutive}; and 'con',
"opposite". Sample words are 'tigerses', "tigress"; 'bacarmas', "bull";
'lunton', "full moon"; 'lunlet', "crescent moon"; and 'succon', "unhappiness". The
advantages of having a few of the most common roots be suffixes including
having alphabetical lists with related terms close to one another (e.g., 'bacar',
"bovine"; 'bacarmas', "bull"; 'bacarses', "cow") and having clearer structure
in words with three or more roots.

Applying Infixes
Six of the most common suffixes can be inserted as infixes into the last
syllable of a root. For instance, the augmentative 'ton' has the corresponding
infix -u-, and the diminutive 'let' has the infix -a-. So 'perton', "augmented
person, giant", can be written 'puer', and 'perlet', "diminutive person, dwarf",
can be written 'paer'. The infixes -i- and -o- have different meanings
depending on whether or not the root modified refers to a person or animal; if it
does, then -i- indicates female, 'baciar', "female bovine, cow", and -o-
indicates male, 'bacoar', "male bovine, bull". If the word does not have animality,
then -i- indicates opposite, 'lium', "light opposite, darkness", and -o-
indicates abstraction, 'loum', "light abstraction, luminosity". The infix -e- is
used when the infix matches the final vowel of the root, so *luun is invalid,
with the correct form being 'leun', "full moon".

Coining Phrases
English and many languages have set phrases, called idioms, whose meaning is
not obvious from the words used. For example, the White House is not just a
house that is white. Dublex phrases are formed using the part-of-speech marker
-i, which means, in effect, that this word idiomatically modifies the word
after it, so "White House" might be 'nieri fambin', "white(black+opposite)+{idiom}
house(family+building)". You can also simply write this 'nierfambin', of
course, but marking words as idiomatic modifiers is useful for indicating the
scope of a modifier: 'nieri', "white", clearly modifies 'fambin', "house", where
'nierfambin' could be read as "white family's building" or "white
family-building".

Forming Acronyms
Really long phrases or words can be truncated into acronyms. For instance,
'vatdartpart', "watery dirt part = mud part = brick", could be shorted to
'vadapart' or 'vadap' ('VAtDArtPart'). The rule for forming acronyms is that you use
only the CV from each word except the last word, which you can either append
in full (as in 'vadapart') or truncate to the initial consonant (as in
'vadap'). However, acronyms can't conflict with one of the 400 roots or 3 pronouns
('von', 'nin' and 'tan', the first-, second- and third-person pronouns,
respectively); therefore, 'voltdarg', "electric road, monorail", can be shortened to
'vod', which is a root meaning "body of water", but would have to be shortened
to 'vodarg'.




---  º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º  º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman Zhang, Sloth-Style Gungfu Typist
"the sloth is a chinese poet upsidedown" --- Jack Kerouac {1922-69}

"Chance is the inner rhythm of the world, and the soul of poetry." - Miguel
de Unamuno

    "One thing foreigners, computers, and poets have in common
is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt

    "There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, and in fact the
poet is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as
'language designer'."  --- O. B. Hardison, Jr.

"La poésie date d' aujour d'hui."   (Poetry dates from today)
"La poésie est en jeu."             (Poetry is in play)
                --- Blaise Cendrars

= ¡gw'araa legooset caacaa!
    ¡reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo! =

[Fight Linguistic Waste!
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--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* ---

Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)
http://www.boheme-magazine.net

     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

= ¡gw'araa legooset caacaa!
    ¡reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo! =

[Fight Linguistic Waste!
    Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!]

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