Re: Language changes, spelling reform (was Conlangea Dreaming)

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:

> > > The t-shirt saying appears also at
> > > http://yhl.freeservers.com/conlang/corpus.html
> > >
> From the looks of the t-shirt saying, it looks like a cross between
> Hindi and Chinese - logographic characters, all hanging off a line. The
> explanation of it makes it clear what it is, but to me it looks more
> logographic than Korean does.
That was part of the intent.  I think Chinese and Hindi are a lot
prettier than Korean (though my inspirations were Korean and Mongolian
Phags-pa).

> > > <G>  Polish and Japanese are on my list, too.  So many languages!
>
> Yeah... the sad part is that I'll probably never even find a someone to
> teach me anything about the languages, at least in the case of the less
> common ones on my list.
I collect used grammars.  I've got 2 for German (plus a book on
"streetwise German" for colloquial), 2 for Japanese, none yet for Polish,
1 for Italian, an intermediate Welsh grammar I'm too terrified to touch,
two for Turkish, and probably a couple others I can't remember at the
moment.  While I don't expect the books to make me fluent in any sense, I
like familiarizing myself with the written language and grammar.  I'd
collect tapes and CD's but they're soooo darn expensive.

> > > ich werde warscheinlich schlafen (a statement more true than I'd like to
> > > think)
>
> I'm sorry, my German is rather poor and I don't know what
> "warscheinlich" means, and Babelfish doesn't help me any.
According to German 122 it sort of emphasizes the probable (as opposed to
certain) nature of a future tense statement.  The translation is (if I
did it right): I will probably sleep.

> > > would render as
> > >
> > > ix werde warszeinlix szlafen
> > >
> > > The only thing it'd be good for so far, though, would be to confuse those
> > > who really know German.  <sigh>  It was a fun conceit while it lasted.
>
> That'd be really interesting to see, how a German would react to that
> kind of spelling reform. It looks pretty odd, but then again, if your
> reformed way was the original way, what we consider the proper way of
> spelling German would probably look just as odd.
I'd ask my half-German boyfriend but his German's almost worse than
mine.  Go figure.  :-p  (He's a physics person, not a language person.)

> In my German class, we had to write some things down based on something
> on a tape or something like that, and someone made a reference to a
> couch, which I promply wrote down as "Kautsch", more to see how my
> German teacher would react than because that's how I thought it
> should've been spelled - she was amused, but not enough to overlook a
> mistake like that.
<LAUGHlaughlaugh>  My boyfriend set up a Diablo II account for me called
"Eincrab," and though I don't remember offhand what German for "crab" is,
I kept mistyping it "Einkrab" because my mind went into German-spelling
mode.  :-)

YHL