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

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> 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.
I might find it somewhere in the Toronto Public Library system - they
have a lot of books, but a lot of the time they're a pain in the @$$ to
get your hands on.

> 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.*
That site looks really informative, but I don't have the time right now
to look into it - I'll do it later. Thanks for the link!

<snip>

> 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.
I actually really like Dostoyevsky, but damn it's dense. Once I spent a
good half hour on one paragraph, just trying to figure out how it
related to the things that happened before it, and the first sentance of
the next paragraph. Brothers Karamazov was worth the effort tho, it's a
great book if you don't mind the denseness. Right now I'm about 30 pages
into Notes from the Underground, and after that I alread have copies of
The Dobule & Crime and Punishment ready for reading, but I won't likely
get to them - I have 3 novels to read in my English classes at school,
and that's trouble waiting to happen.

> 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.
>
Of those 3, I've only read the Communist Manifesto, and I agree that
it's a very dense read, and there's *WAY* too much irrelevent stuff in
there - the first quarter of the book, apart from the opening sentance,
is all about French communes, for crying out loud. It never get's tied
into Communism, either. A highly over-rated book, IMHO. Denseness can be
forgiven with a book like The Brothers Karamazov, because it's very much
so required to make the book what it is, but with the Communist
Manifesto, it's just bad writing.

> > 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!
<puzzled> Maybe it's the sleep deprivation talking, but I just don't
understand. Sorry.

--
Robert