Re: Language changes, spelling reform (was Conlangea Dreaming)
| From: | Robert Hailman <robert@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Thursday, October 12, 2000, 4:09 |
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Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
D'oh! I forgot to reply to half the email.
<snip>
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.
<snip>
> > <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.
> > Actually, I once contemplated doing that to German--well, x for ch and sz
> > for sh. I couldn't figure out a way to justify it, though it looked
> > pretty funny, e.g.
> >
> > 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.
> > 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.
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.
<snip>
--
Robert