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

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
> >
> > > Not me, that's for sure. All I know about Korean is that the writing
> > > system isn't really a syllabary, but it looks like one, and that Korean
> > > is spoken in Korea.
> >
> > It's pretty alphabetical, but it isn't quite arranged linearly.  :-p
>
> Ah yes, now I remember. All the letters in one syllable are put together
> in some non-linear way, and then these groupings of letters are arranged
> linearly.
*If* you can find it, _The Korean Alphabet_ explains it pretty well.

Here's also an intro to the language, including alphabet and other useful
basic stuff; the guy who did it knows more Korean than I do, and there
are sound samples of *everything.*

http://catcode.com/kintro/index.htm

> > I have no idea what my conscript looks like to others, though I'd love to
> > hear from anyone who wants to venture opinions.  Like Korean, it's a
> > syllabically-arranged *alphabet* but it probably looks like logographs or
> > something funky from a distance.
>
> Is there a website for it? I'm more than willing to venture opinions,
> once I see it.
Sure:
http://yhl.freeservers.com/conlang/ch-alpha.html
(I screwed up a couple consonants but the "feel" of the alphabet
shouldn't be affected by future corrections.)

The t-shirt saying appears also at
http://yhl.freeservers.com/conlang/corpus.html

:-p

> I'd like to have an alphabet similar to that of Korean as a conscript,
> but I don't know anything about the Korean alphabet except for what I
> said not 3 paragraphs above.
See website and book references above.  I'd be hard-pressed to explain it
without some paper handy.  :-(

> > Korean also is apparently spoken by Koreans living in Russia, China, and
> > Japan.  But it isn't exactly a popular language by world standards.
>
> I've never encountered someone who was (to my knowledge) speaking
> Korean, tho that's more because I never bother to find out what
> languages people are speaking more so than it's because there are no
> Koreans in Toronto, I'm sure there are quite a few. I'd like to learn
> more about Korean, I should add it to my list of "Languages I Want to
> Know, but Probably Will Never Learn", where it will be accompanied by
> Polish, Icelandic, Finnish, Swedish & Japanese.
<G>  Polish and Japanese are on my list, too.  So many languages!

> My Polish friend proposed a spelling reform that uses sz & cz where we
> use sh & ch, and I guess logically tz rather than th and pz rather than
> ph, but he's pretty much nuts, and the rest of his reform was pretty
> much spelling English as if it were Polish. It was interesting to read,
> but not feasible at all.
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)

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.

> > Fast reading has a few downsides...among other things, I run out of books
> > in the summer so quickly it isn't even funny.  <wry g>  (This was a
> > problem in Korea because the school library was closed during the summer....)
>
> I spent the whole summer reading one book... but then again, it was The
> Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky, so that can explain it - 700 pages,
> and 700 of the densest pages I've ever read. It takes forever to read
> just one chapter! After that I knocked off Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut in
> a few days. It was like 75-100 pages a day - that's no 1000 pages, but
> it's pretty good for me - it beats the 12-odd I was doing for the
> Brothers Karamazov. Of course, this was only reading for an hour or two
> a day, I filled my time otherwise as well.
<laugh>  I was warned off Dostoyevsky by a Russian Jew from Boston (my
comp sci partner one class) who was taking a Russian lit class.  Go figure.

The 3 slowest and densest reads in my life:

_Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ by Douglas A. Hofstadter.
J.S. Bach, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, artificial intelligence,
EScher's artwork.  Stunningly good and worthwhile, but I was doing about
half a chapter a day because I had to learn everything to understand what
came after.

Selections of Aquinas' _Summa Theologica_, which I swear I don't
understand how anyone could have finished it and made it influential.
<shudder>

The Communist Manifesto by Marx.  <shudder>

Only the first one was worth in IMHO, historical value aside.

> individual letters at all when written on the board. I'm going to
> probably need glasses when I get my driver's license, which means I'm
> going to have a nice "X" on my drivers license - they could have picked
> a letter that has less connotations of "defective" and such, but nooooo,
> in Ontario they use "X" for "needs corrective lenses" - very nice.
> </irrelevant rant>
<wry g>  I have an X on my learner's permit.  My longest spate of driving
was 15 min. on I-88.  I don't deny the X in my case is necessary...though
from looking at the back of the thing, there weren't many letters left!

YHL