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

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > 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).
Korean looks pretty nice, tho Chinese & Hindi look nice too.

I've always wanted to make a con-script writing on a line like Hindi,
but I haven't gotten around to it.

> > 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.
Cool... where do you get all these? I have a copy of "Latin Made
Simple", but that's all.

> > 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.
>
I understood "Ich werde schlafen" as "I will sleep", so that makes
sense.

> > 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.)
I don't know anyone who's an L1 German speaker... Yiddish yes, but
German no. My German teacher would just be confused by it, but she
wouldn't accept it well.

> > 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
> > 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.  :-)
I'd probably do that too. My mind is in German-spelling mode pretty much
all the time, which is odd considering how little German I actually
know.

--
Robert