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There are 25 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: TECH: Sound Change program
From: JS Bangs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: kinship systems
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: whistling s's
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Subterranea
From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Subterranea
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Subterranea
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Irish English "whistled" /t/
From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become
official!)
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: History of constructed languages
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. The first McGuffey Reader
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: Irish English "whistled" /t/
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: whistling s's
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: TECH: Sound Change program
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: whistling s's
From: JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: Subterranea
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: kinship systems
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Miapimoquitch phonology sketch
From: Dirk Elzinga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
19. Re: The first McGuffey Reader
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
20. Re: kinship systems
From: Joseph Bridwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
21. Re: Subterranea
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
22. Re: History of constructed languages
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
23. Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
24. Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
From: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
25. Re: Subterranea
From: # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 22:55:02 -0500
From: JS Bangs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: TECH: Sound Change program
> > First, it all sounds wonderful. I hope it works as planned!
I got in on this thread late, but I would like to point out that
everything mentioned here, plus more features that nobody but me seems
to need, is possible with the Perl module Lingua::Phonology. Of
course, the Phonology module has the disadvantage of being much more
complex, hard to work with, and broken in the most recent release
(although the brokenness is not my fault--XML::Simple stopped
working), and I haven't had time to work on it in over a year. And it
requires you to code hardcore Perl. But in principle it can do all of
this, plus more.
If I ever get the time, I could write a simpler command-line script
using the module as a backend that would do something more accessible
to the common man.
Sorry for the shameless self-promotion.
--
JS Bangs
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://jaspax.com
"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
- Pedro the Lion
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 22:57:15 -0500
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: kinship systems
"Joseph Bridwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Mine are mundane.
>
> Thule:
[...]
> 03. same age sibling, child of same mother
Wouldn't that necessarily be a "twin"?
--
Damian
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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 00:07:53 -0400
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: whistling s's
Christopher Wright wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 13:48:04 -0700, JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > if I say s or sh and sort of curl my tongue tip
> >up, I get the whistle.
>
> That might be as simple as [s`] -- the voiceless retroflex fricative. I
> like that sound.
That's what I've been thinking all along-- [s`] or else simply the "apical
s", apparently with lip rounding.
>
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Message: 4
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 01:49:13 -0400
From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Subterranea
Working on an orcish language, I'm finding the fact that they spend much
(most) of their time underground to be presenting some interesting
challenges.
Specifically Time.
What natural cyclical phenomena are there that operate detectably in an
underground environment?
I've got the bat-flight/bat-roost cycle, and was wondering about tides, but
don't you need a pretty large body of open water for that to be an
appreciable factor? IIRC, lakes don't get appreciable tides. Is there
anything else I could use?
And what about longer time periods? The "year" is presumably more or less
irrelevant if you're down deep enough- would their longer time units be
just arbitrary, and probably varying widely by tribe?
The other main challenge is creating a subterranean ecosystem big enough
and diverse enough to support humanoids, but as a biology graduate, I'm on
more or less home turf there...
The one problem is sources of energy.
I've got tree roots, bat (& other) guano, and bacteria around volcanic
vents and subterranean geysers/mudpools. Have I missed any other ways that
energy can enter the system nonmagically?
Geoff
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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 23:17:15 -0700
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
Geoff wrote:
<<
Specifically Time.
What natural cyclical phenomena are there that operate detectably in an
underground environment?
>>
I certainly can't say a thing about biology, but I have a few ideas
for this.
First, even though they can't see the sun or perceive its motion,
they do sleep, right? (A genuine question: I don't know if orcs
need sleep.) If they do, then a "day" would simply be from the
time they wake up to the time they go to sleep. Of course, not
everyone will do this at the same time, so perhaps it can be set
to a chief or king's sleep pattern. And, indeed, it might change
with every new chief or king.
Another thing that happens with time is hunger. If orcs eat,
they'll invariably get hungry after a certain period of time after
they've eaten. And if they have big meals, then perhaps time
could be based on meal times--especially if they involve large
gatherings.
And another way to perceive time is through age. Of course,
age happens gradually, and you can't perceive it the way you
can the passage of the sun, but say there were an orcish philosopher
who decided to write an anatomy of aging (like that old book
The Anatomy of Melancholy). He might reason that even
after a week's time, specific signs of aging will take place. Of
course, he won't have the concept of "week" at his disposal,
so he'll have to come up with his own term, which might be
based on the type of change that takes place after a set period
of time. So even if they don't have time measures, they will
have real measures. So say that after a week an orc nail is
said to grow a tenth of a centimeter--called a blick, or whatever
in the orcish language. Then a week would be a blicksgrowth,
and a day would be a seventh of a blicksgrowth (or however
he decided to divide it). This could be the basic unit, or one
might say, for a month, that an untended nail will grow 4/10
of a centimeter, or a blork. Now you have a period of a
blorksgrowth. And so on.
Anyway, those are some ideas. Having never thought
seriously enough about how to lexicalize the passage of
time (and, as a language creator, by all rights I should
have), I'm not sure if these make sense, or could work.
What do you think?
-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 6
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 23:37:55 -0700
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
On Apr 5, 2005 10:49 PM, Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Poster: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Subterranea
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> And what about longer time periods? The "year" is presumably more or less
> irrelevant if you're down deep enough- would their longer time units be
> just arbitrary, and probably varying widely by tribe?
>
What about this: Think of the environment outside of their
subterranean home. If the caves have rivers and lakes running through
them, perhaps the rivers go through a seasonal wet/dry climate. So,
any rivers and streams running underground from the surface might slow
down in flow during a dry period, and then increase during a wet
period. Of course if your orcs live below the surface of a
permanently verdant and wet world, water flow through underground
streams would probably be more or less stable.
--
Kiwasatra ay tepan ura nga garu kucaku songa
majenyora bilat maacaku lawan ku saal
Tal sora inumyara nga sepotyal ngaruan ura nga puka ku
matambiryay
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Message: 7
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 06:40:42 +0000
From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Irish English "whistled" /t/
The Irish English "whistled" /t/ is usually referred to as an voiceless
non-sibilant alevolar slit fricative, or Irish English slit-/t/ for short.
Acoustically it's very similar to [SH] (the postalveolar). Something similar
occurs in Australian English, which I'm looking at with an Aussie colleague
of mine in Cambridge.
With a colleague at the University of Aberdeen, Carmen Llamas, I carried out
the first (to my knowledge) detailed acoustic study of Irish English
slit-/t/. The work is currently being written up for publication, but some
info on a single speaker is available in:
Mark J. Jones and Carmen Llamas. (2003). “Fricated pre-aspirated /t/ in
Middlesbrough English: an acoustic study.” In Solé, M. J., D. Recasens, and
J. Romero. (eds.). Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of
Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona: 655-658.
There is also:
H. Pandeli, J.F. Eska, M.J. Ball, and J. Rahilly. “Problems of phonetic
transcription: the case of the Hiberno-English slit-t,” Journal of the
International Phonetic Association, vol. 27, pp. 65-75, 1997.
For more information as the work on Irish and Australian English progresses
see:
http://kiri.ling.cam.ac.uk/mark/fricatedT.html
Mark
Mark J. Jones
Department of Linguistics
University of Cambridge
http://kiri.ling.cam.ac.uk/mark
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Message: 8
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 09:36:40 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become
official!)
Quoting Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Mon, 04 Apr 2005 10:17:37 -0400, Christopher Wright
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Schwa is a reduced vowel;
>
> Schwa is a mid central vowel. In English, a short schwa is the realisation
> of several reduced vowels.
>
> > in spectrograms,
> > you always tell it because it's extremely short
>
> Not always so. /@:/ exists in the Real World, including in Sinhalese.
There's variants of English that've got it (phonetically) in words like "girl"
[g@:l].
Andreas
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Message: 9
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 10:49:51 +0200
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: History of constructed languages
Muke Tever skrev:
> I _do_ remember this. Hmm. Let me look it up.
>
> It was in Acharnians; Pseudartabas has the line:
> "Jartaman exarx 'anapissona satra." (or: exarxan apissona?)
>
> The English version at Perseus bears a footnote "Jargon,
> no doubt meaningless in all languages."
> http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Aristoph.+Ach.+100
>
> *Muke!
It certainly does have an Old Persian look and feel.
I guess OP was the barbarian language par preference
for Athenians at the time.
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
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Message: 10
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 11:17:53 +0200
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
Hey all,
I began translating the first McGuffey Reader today, but I
found that Ayeri's syntax is way more difficult than the
English one. You need more words and need to mark
everything for cases etc. Ayeri is an agglutinating(-ve?)
language and so there are more morphemes per word than
there are in English. English words are often shorter and
accordingly easier to read at sight, at least the words
used in the first lessons of McGuffey's. I wonder how such
a primer for Ayeri first-graders would look like if there
are no short, easy words. Maybe using a simplified, more
colloquial language? I don't know if it would be a too big
change to put all the case markers in front of an NP
instead and making the personal endings (plus case marker)
single words so that verbs are not conjugated anymore.
Maybe even drop double syllables where they are not the
product of grammatical reduplication? I think it would
simplify the structure a lot, though, except dropping
syllables. Langs often search for the most simple way to
express something as it seems, there wouldn't be
'watered-down' everyday language otherwise -- *IMHO*.
Anyway, because of the reasons mentioned above, I don't know
if I should go on with this. Chapters 1 to 3 are included
below.
Carsten
=============================================================
MENAN COYALAYAMOENA ENA MC GUFFEY
-------------------------------------
CONG NARANOEA AIAYERI
- Eranin ena Becker Carsten -
----------[ Nernan n1 ] ----------
veney in ang nimpao iy-
v e n y i a ng m p o à
Veney.
Veneyin ang manimpiyà.
----------[ Nernan n2 ] ----------
muren ea yomáo
ling sihan on
u r l s h
Muren. Sihan.
Murenang ea yomaconiyà ling sihanon?
Murenang ea yomaiyà ling sihanon.
----------[ Nernan n3 ] ----------
ayon taháo dadang lei
reng acon ar- cong
ta ena
t á d c è
Ayonin ang tahaiyà dadanglei.
Dadangreng ea yomaconarè cong tain iyàena?
Ea yomárèreng cong tain iyàena.
<TO BE CONTINUED, MAYBE>
--
Edatamanon le matahanarà benenoea eityabo ena Bahis Pinena,
15-A8-58-1-3-12-12 ena Curan Tertanyan.
» http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 11
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 11:49:02 +0200
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The first McGuffey Reader
The first McGuffey Reader. Where can I find it?
And the pixures?
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
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Message: 12
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 11:41:23 +0100
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Irish English "whistled" /t/
Mark Jones wrote:
> The Irish English "whistled" /t/ is usually referred to as an voiceless
> non-sibilant alevolar slit fricative, or Irish English slit-/t/ for short.
> Acoustically it's very similar to [SH] (the postalveolar). Something
> similar occurs in Australian English, which I'm looking at with an Aussie
> colleague of mine in Cambridge.
Excellent! I'll take a read through whichever of these I can get my
hands on.
K.
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Message: 13
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 11:42:37 +0100
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: whistling s's
Stephen Mulraney wrote:
> On Apr 5, 2005 3:55 PM, Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>JC wrote:
>>
>>As an adjunct to this, does anybody know how to describe the (in)famous
>>Irish "whistled-t"? It's quite similar to this, only softer and not
>>quite so much curled as raised.
>
> What is this "whistled-t" of which you speak? I've probably heard it, but the
> description doesn't bring anything to mind immediately...
Try saying "butter" or "thought". It's the final and intervocalic
sounds.
K
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Message: 14
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 13:59:45 +0200
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: TECH: Sound Change program
On Wednesday 06 April 2005 03:06 CEST, Paul Bennett wrote:
> At a given point in the sound change definition file, you
> can put (e.g.)
>
> i=V[+front][+close][-round]
>
> and later on, something like
>
> k > c / $V[+front]
>
> At least, that's the plan.
There's already a program called "Zounds" that can do
similar things. But ...
> > * Well, once it's windows or unix :)
>
> It shall be Java, with GUI completely optional. Thus,
> hopefully, if you've got it, I'll run on it.
> (sufficiently wimpy devices need not apply).
... Zounds is in Python and needs the newest GTK+/GTK2 and
whatnot for the GUI. There are no updates of these libs
available anymore for FC2!! The latest you can get is GTK
2.4.x, the program needs 2.6.x. I haven't tried builidng
from source yet, because it never works when I try to
compile something. There's always something missing,
outdated without any updates available or just installed at
a place my system thinks is right but the ./config does
not. Recently, I tried to compile a program that needed
GTK+-2.0 >= v2.4, and all I had was GTK2 v2.4. The program
didn't understand that these are the same libs (at least I
believe). It's a mess.
But Java works fine. So ...
> > But it all sounds great. I await with trembling
> > fingers.
... What he said.
Carsten
--
Edatamanon le matahanarà sitayea eityabo ena Bahis Pinena,
15-A8-58-1-3-12-12 ena Curan Tertanyan.
» http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri
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Message: 15
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 06:37:18 -0700
From: JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: whistling s's
--- Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Christopher Wright wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 13:48:04 -0700, JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > > if I say s or sh and sort of curl my tongue tip
> > >up, I get the whistle.
> >
> > That might be as simple as [s`] -- the voiceless retroflex fricative. I
> > like that sound.
>
> That's what I've been thinking all along-- [s`] or else simply the "apical
> s", apparently with lip rounding.
> >
Could be. "Voiceless retroflex fricative", while I understand the words and can
do something that seems to qualify, doesn't tell me what it really sounds like.
And apical just means articulated with the tongue tip, right? Is that less
vague than it sounds?
Mine doesn't have any lip rounding.
And yes, Gopher from Winnie the Pooh does it :-) Not who I was thinking of, but
I found a sound clip.
JC
--
Watch the Reply-To...
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Message: 16
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 15:57:55 +0200
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
Hi!
Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Working on an orcish language, I'm finding the fact that they spend much
> (most) of their time underground to be presenting some interesting
> challenges.
>
> Specifically Time.
> What natural cyclical phenomena are there that operate detectably in an
> underground environment?
Growth of stalacmites? :-) Maybe a little slow and I suppose the speed
is subject to changes due to different amounts of water.
Something quite stable: a large pendulum (->Foucault) would work for
measuring planet rotation. This, however, maybe too artificial as the
effect will not be very overt in daily life, so a pre-industrial
culture will probably not find this out easily.
**Henrik
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Message: 17
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 15:09:59 +0000
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: kinship systems
>From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: kinship systems
>Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 22:57:15 -0500
>
>"Joseph Bridwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Mine are mundane.
> >
> > Thule:
>[...]
> > 03. same age sibling, child of same mother
>
>Wouldn't that necessarily be a "twin"?
usually...maybe not always.
:)
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Message: 18
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 09:14:11 -0600
From: Dirk Elzinga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Miapimoquitch phonology sketch
Hey.
The first draft of the Miapimoquitch phonological sketch is finished.
If anyone is interested in getting a PDF, please email me and I'll be
happy to send one along with the usual solicitation of comments,
critiques, etc.
I should probably say a couple of things about it first, though. The
style and scope of the description is meant to emulate those found in
the volume edited by Harry Hoijer, _Linguistic Structures of Native
North America_. This means that it is a bit short on details, and the
theoretical orientation and descriptive practices might seem a bit ...
quaint. This was done on purpose; I'm supposing that the grammatical
sketch was written by one Richard Alma Leckler, grandson of Alvin
Walker (formerly Alma Walker). It was intended for the Hoijer volume,
but was not included because it was abandoned by the author for
personal and family reasons.
Dirk
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Message: 19
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 08:30:19 -0700
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: The first McGuffey Reader
--- Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The first McGuffey Reader. Where can I find it?
> And the pixures?
<snip>
Here is the text: http://fiziwig.com/mcguffey.html
I don't have the pictures.
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Message: 20
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 15:46:03 -0000
From: Joseph Bridwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: kinship systems
> > Thule:
> [...]
> > 03. same age sibling, child of same mother
>
> Wouldn't that necessarily be a "twin"?
Do you mean identical? or fraternal? Thule don't birth identical
twins. They occassionally birth fraternal twins, but usually they
birth in litters of 3 to 5. I'd not considered it, but I suppose they
might have a special term for a single child born with no litter
mates.
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Message: 21
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 09:21:06 -0700
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
--- Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Working on an orcish language, I'm finding the fact
> that they spend much
> (most) of their time underground to be presenting
> some interesting
> challenges.
>
> Specifically Time.
> What natural cyclical phenomena are there that
> operate detectably in an
> underground environment?
<snip>
In human experiments deep underground people settle
into a regular 26-hour "day" based on their own
biological rythms.
Or perhaps orcs have some addition internal sensory
organ that detects tidal forces, like some deep-water
fish have?
--gary
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Message: 22
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 19:17:14 +0100
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: History of constructed languages
On Wednesday, April 6, 2005, at 01:20 , Muke Tever wrote:
> Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Quoting Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
[snip]
>>> No, no - these are essentially onomatopoeia. I was thinking of a
>>> sentence
>>> a slave is supposed to utter in a non-Greek language. I thought it came
>>> in
>>> the Archarnians, but I may have dis-remembered.
>>
>> Is it known it *is* made up, rather than a fragment, more-or-less
>> distorted, of
>> some actual non-Greek language?
There have been suggestions that it is a distorted form of some natlang,
_including_ Greek. But the suggestions have attracted few supporters other
than the author of the suggestion.
> I _do_ remember this. Hmm. Let me look it up.
>
> It was in Acharnians; Pseudartabas has the line:
> "Jartaman exarx 'anapissona satra." (or: exarxan apissona?)
Good - so I did remember correctly. It's been a long while since I read it.
For those who can read it, Aristophanes' Greek version has:
¦É¦Á¦Ñ¦Ó¦Á¦Ì¦Á¦Í ¦Å¦Î¦Á¦Ñ¦Î¦Á¦Í ¦Á¦Ð¦É¦Ò¦Ò¦Ï¦Í¦Á ¦Ò¦Á¦Ó¦Ñ¦Á (line 100)
or, it has been suggested:
¦É¦Á¦Ñ¦Ó¦Á¦Ì¦Á¦Í ¦Å¦Î¦Á¦Ñ¦Î ¦Á¦Í¦Á¦Ð¦É¦Ò¦Ò¦Ï¦Í¦Á ¦Ò¦Á¦Ó¦Ñ¦Á
> The English version at Perseus bears a footnote "Jargon,
> no doubt meaningless in all languages."
Yep - which answers Andreas' question.
A few lines on (104) the ambassador interprets the words as meaning: "The
great king will send you gold" (by 'tThe great king' the Greeks of the
time always meant the Persian emperor). How you parse the words is up to
you.
Umm... Is -an the suffixed definite article, added to both noun &
adjective - iartam-an exarx-an (the great king)?
:)
Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
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Message: 23
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 11:33:58 -0700
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
Carsten wrote:
<<
I began translating the first McGuffey Reader today, but I
found that Ayeri's syntax is way more difficult than the
English one.
>>
Well, I don't know about that. It just seems to where more of
it on its sleeve than English does.
Carsten continues:
<<
English words are often shorter and
accordingly easier to read at sight, at least the words
used in the first lessons of McGuffey's. I wonder how such
a primer for Ayeri first-graders would look like if there
are no short, easy words. Maybe using a simplified, more
colloquial language?
>>
Since no one's ventured a reply yet, I'll give you my thoughts.
First, though the words are longer and more morphologically
complex, they don't look all that tough. I mean:
Veneyin ang manimpiyà.
That's a sentence with three elements. That's not too bad. Plus,
you're comparing Ayeri to an essentially *isolating* language,
English. There's just no way to compare. I mean, how can you
beat "He ran home"? Three syllables, yet an entire sentence.
So I think it should be natural that English sentences are shorter
and less morphologically complex than Ayeri, and that I think
you shouldn't worry about. I *certainly* don't think you should
simplify the language. Consider a real world. Would you want
to teach children an entirely different form of the language?
They'd end up learning too languages: Real Ayeri at home and
on the playground, and Simplified Ayeri in school.
Something more towards addressing your concern, though, is
that the subject matter should be readily understandable to
children, and the expression should be as direct as can be in
Ayeri. If that method is more complex than English, it doesn't
mean (I think) that children will have a harder time learning it
than they do English. After all, they will be hearing it all the
time. And (and this is important) children actually do learn
Georgian. As far as I'm concerned, if a child can learn Georgian,
*anything* is possible. ;)
So, the basic point is this: What you've got looks good so far.
I think you should continue.
-David
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"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
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Message: 24
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 15:45:58 -0400
From: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
On Apr 6, 2005 2:33 PM, David J. Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Something more towards addressing your concern, though, is
> that the subject matter should be readily understandable to
> children, and the expression should be as direct as can be in
> Ayeri. If that method is more complex than English, it doesn't
> mean (I think) that children will have a harder time learning it
> than they do English. After all, they will be hearing it all the
> time. And (and this is important) children actually do learn
> Georgian. As far as I'm concerned, if a child can learn Georgian,
> *anything* is possible. ;)
I agree with David. After all, by the first grade the kids presumably
know how to *speak* their language, although in some seriously
polysynthetic languages it seems that the *most* complex constructions
might not be mastered until the ages of ten or eleven.
I'm not all that familiar with the McGuffey Readers, but from the name
it seems like their purpose it to teach kids to read. By the age of
seven, they certainly have a good grasp of their spoken language, even
if it's not suitable for formal oratory yet. Is the written language
is basically the same language as the spoken one?
One thought: I've been learning Tzeltal, a Mayan language of Chiapas,
and the wonderful manual I've been reading uses a somewhat different,
slightly simpler orthography than other works, or the "official"
orthography if there is one. In it, multi-morpheme words are often
broken up and it's pretended that they're separate, independent words.
They're not -- they can't appear independently and they don't, if
I've inferred correctly, even satisfy the minimum phonotactic
requirements for words -- but once the basic writing game is mastered
a more official orthography can be easily adopted.
So I've been puttering along, feeling all along that "hey, this is
*easy*!" Lots of little, monosyllabic words, seems almost analytic.
It isn't, of course, but I'm going to pretend as long as I can.
I can't see that this would really *hinder* the children; perhaps all
that the more "advanced" orthographies do is leave out spaces. This
seems to be basically what's happening above anyway, moving from parts
to wholes; the only difference is that maybe they won't write the long
"adult" sequences until later. After all, we learn to print a year or
two before we learn cursive, and I don't think it really hinders us.
--
Patrick Littell
PHIL205: MWF 2:00-3:00, M 6:00-9:00
Voice Mail: ext 744
Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00
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Message: 25
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 16:08:34 -0400
From: # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
Geoff Horswood wrote:
>The other main challenge is creating a subterranean ecosystem big enough
>and diverse enough to support humanoids, but as a biology graduate, I'm on
>more or less home turf there...
>The one problem is sources of energy.
>I've got tree roots, bat (& other) guano, and bacteria around volcanic
>vents and subterranean geysers/mudpools. Have I missed any other ways that
>energy can enter the system nonmagically?
It's a cave, it had to be diged by water so somewhere there are probably
fish and aquatic ecosystem
Also there are lot of animals that hide in a cave and get out to eat, orcs
who don't want to get out just have to hunt them. These may be lizards,
insects, bats (as you thought of), big mammals
They could breed some animals like lizards that eat insects
There could have some fossil combustible that they would burn and from which
they would get the necessary light to make some agriculture
But in a conworld you can do something:
If the montain in which the orcs live contains radioactive ressources, there
could have plants that evolved to not only support but also use the
radioactivity as source of energy
The beta(betha?) particles (that can be stoped by paper and so are the less
powerful) could probably be used to produce energy with an organism adapted
to it
- Max
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