------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers.
At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/EA3HyD/3MnJAA/79vVAA/GSaulB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
There are 11 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. TECH: Wanted: Food for my Sound Changer
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Subterranea
From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Subterranea
From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Fwd: Subterranea
From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. concreole workshop open
From: Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Fwd: Subterranea
From: Gregory Gadow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Subterranea
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Seljuk & related Turkic languages?
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: Subterranea
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 23:52:28 -0400
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: TECH: Wanted: Food for my Sound Changer
So, Phonomorph (my sound change program) is ready for some serious
alpha-testing, although the GUI is still a distant dream, and the whole
damn purpose was (originally) to demonstrate GUI programming for a college
course.
I'm looking for in-depth charts of sound changes between any two
languages, and substantial fully-pointed texts in any of the source
languages.
I have Beekes, so I can make a start doing several PIE -> X change lists,
but I lack for source texts. Quasilikewise, I have found many Latin texts
(even a few with vowel length marked), but no good lists of sounds changes.
For your entertainment, here is a certain sentence(*) after running it
through my test changes...
Nekö porro küskwã est, kü dolore ipsu kuya dolor sit amet, kontsektedur,
azibissi welit, sed kuya non numkwã eyu mozi tempora intsizunt ut lawore
et dolore magnã alikwã kwaerat woluptade.
As you will no doubt be able to tell, more work is definitely required,
but it's a start.
(*)Those who untranslate it ought to be able to discern why I felt it
apposite.
Paul
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 01:40:14 -0400
From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
On Tue, 5 Apr 2005 23:17:15 -0700, David J. Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>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?
>
Very thought-provoking...
I may not use the direct egs you've given, but it's certainly something to
think about,
G
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 01:45:32 -0400
From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
On Wed, 6 Apr 2005 16:08:34 -0400, # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>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
Love it! I think I'll use it.
Of course, they don't know about radioactivity; to them, it's probably some
kind of magic. But I like to keep my fantasy earthed in reality where
possible, and _then_ twist it around.
Thanks!
Geoff
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 16:44:22 +0200
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
Multi-Reply here to save bandwidth ...
On Wednesday 06 April 2005 21:45 CEST, Patrick Littell
wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2005 2:33 PM, David J. Peterson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
> 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.
> > ;)
Hehe. Georgian must be perverse from what I heard about it
here, but I didn't know its morphology is *so* difficult.
> 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.
OK. Maybe children would be, say, 7, 8 years old in their
first year? Over here, children usually go to school from 6
or 7 years on, depending on whether you're born before or
after July 1st. Being born in August, I was 7.
> 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.
Exactly.
> 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?
I guess written language is as often a bit more formal and
conservative. But basically, I agree. I remember myself not
understanding why I have to learn about grammar at school
when I can speak my L1 already quite properly. And compared
to English, German syntax is due to declension and
conjugation of nearly anything more difficult than English.
> 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.
That'd be a possibility, putting mid-dots or hyphens in
between, if not even spaces. Though usually, two same
sounds are reduced to one, with vowels getting an acute
accent. The combination is not necessarily pronounced
differently.
> After all, we learn to
> print a year or two before we learn cursive, and I don't
> think it really hinders us. --
Hehe, there is no distinction between printed and
handwritten media because they're preindustrial.
On Thursday 07 April 2005 00:48 CEST, B. Garcia wrote:
> True. Think about our own native languages and the
> shortcuts people use when speaking it.
>
> What I present for Ayhan is the formal language.
> Colloquially, they might tend to drop the
> animacy/inanimacy, natural/unnaturalness affixes (but i'd
> not gotte that far).
I already thought about changes in colloquial language. I
basically thought of simplifying the (in)animacy stuff
which I also have and fronting case markers. They're
articles in front of verbs anyway. Some phonetic reduction
and simplification of weird vowel clusters etc., et voilà,
a colloquial standard.
On Thursday 07 April 2005 01:42 CEST, Gregory Gadow wrote:
> It might be instructive to look at a reader in an
> agglutinative natlang. What would a Turkish primer look
> like?
As long as the texts at the page Tim May gave the link to
include interlinears, it'd be worth to have a look at that.
Carsten
--
Edatamanon le matahanarà sitayea eityabo ena Bahis Venena,
15-A8-58-1-3-13-13 ena Curan Tertanyan.
» http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 5
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 17:38:39 +0100
From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Fwd: Subterranea
Aargh, another email saved from the clutches of gmail:
--
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Apr 7, 2005 3:10 AM
Subject: Re: Subterranea
To: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Apr 7, 2005 1:56 AM, Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2005 2:17 AM, David J. Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Like determining units of length based on the king's stride and the
> length of one of his finger bones. An orcish second = the length of
> the king's heartbeat, at rest, on average. The day begins when he
> rises and ends when he falls asleep. A week, maybe when he needs a
> manicure or haircut. A month? Well, maybe we leave that to the queen
> to determine.
It strikes me that week is a fairly artifical unit, being intermediate between
a day (roughly one sleep-wake cycle) and a month (roughly one lunar
cycle), not not really being significant otherwise. Though, if the orcs have
evolved underground, I'm not so sure the queen's cycle would be related
to the lunar cycle...
s.
--
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 6
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 15:11:42 -0400
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey
Carsten Becker wrote:
> On Thursday 07 April 2005 01:42 CEST, Gregory Gadow wrote:
>
> > It might be instructive to look at a reader in an
> > agglutinative natlang. What would a Turkish primer look
> > like?
>
> As long as the texts at the page Tim May gave the link to
> include interlinears, it'd be worth to have a look at that.
>
(International Children's Digital Library:
http://www.icdlbooks.org/ )
The handful I looked at, were simply on-line copies of published childrens'
books-- stories, not primers like McG. I actually read the Tagalog "Legend
of Bitter Melon" (cute illustrations!) aimed at ages 3-7, and it seemed to
have some quite complex verbal forms (maybe the adult reader is supposed to
"interlinearize" these for the child?). A related Tag. problem: stress and
final /?/ are phonemic, but not indicated in writing. No interlinears in
the texts, but a smooth Engl. trans. at the bottom of each page.
Clearly, in a language with a decently phonemic writing system (certainly
Indonesian qualifies, and Tagalog; some Romance languages and German/Dutch
to an extent) the aim in teaching reading/writing is to get the child to
associate _sound_ with _letter_. English no doubt has to greatly limit the
learner's initial vocab. in order to avoid some of the more egregious
vagaries of our spelling system.
(Most of our conlangs, Ayeri included I think, also boast orthographies with
near one-to-one correspondence. Maggel excluded...)
One of my native Span. professors, years ago, claimed that there was no need
for a verb "to spell" in Span.; one simply asks, "¿cómo se escribe [e.g.]
"hombre"?" and the answer is, "con ache".
ObConlang: Some of the problems teaching Kash kids to read/write:
--morphophonemic changes due to the nominalizing prefixes añ- and kañ-;
--sandhi rules e.g. karumbi 'my lord' /karun+mi/, nimbutro 'will remember'
/nimbur+to/ and in many compounds-- I suppose an initial teaching text could
put the morphemic breakdown in parens. after the actual written form.
--the occasional penult-stress violations
--inserting w/y before -V case endings on V-final words (required by the
writing system, these w/y's are essentially silent-- associated with the
more general rule, "two vowel symbols in a row aren't permitted")
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 7
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 22:55:20 +0300
From: Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: concreole workshop open
The concreole workshop is open for all who are interested at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/concreole/
To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Send your messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- Yitzik
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 8
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 14:29:22 -0700
From: Gregory Gadow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Subterranea
> Aargh, another email saved from the clutches of gmail:
> --
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Apr 7, 2005 3:10 AM
> Subject: Re: Subterranea
> To: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
> On Apr 7, 2005 1:56 AM, Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Apr 6, 2005 2:17 AM, David J. Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Like determining units of length based on the king's stride and the
>> length of one of his finger bones. An orcish second = the length of
>> the king's heartbeat, at rest, on average. The day begins when he
>> rises and ends when he falls asleep. A week, maybe when he needs a
>> manicure or haircut. A month? Well, maybe we leave that to the queen
>> to determine.
>
> It strikes me that week is a fairly artifical unit, being intermediate
> between
> a day (roughly one sleep-wake cycle) and a month (roughly one lunar
> cycle), not not really being significant otherwise.
Not all that arbitrary. It makes perfect sense to divide a lunar cycle in
to a bright period and a dark period; both of those are about 14 days
long. If you subdivide that further in to "bright growing brighter",
"bright growing darker", "dark growing darker" and "dark growing brighter"
phase, you end up with a month consisting of four seven day weeks.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 9
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 22:58:18 +0000
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
>From: Geoff Horswood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: Subterranea
>Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 01:45:32 -0400
>
>On Wed, 6 Apr 2005 16:08:34 -0400, # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>wrote:
>
> >
> >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
>Love it! I think I'll use it.
>Of course, they don't know about radioactivity; to them, it's probably some
>kind of magic. But I like to keep my fantasy earthed in reality where
>possible, and _then_ twist it around.
makes sense.
though, if you're looking for energy sources...remember bacteria...they eat
rocks, sulfur, oil...exhaling methane and various other gas.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Geoff
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 10
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 23:00:24 +0000
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Seljuk & related Turkic languages?
does anyone know of any good online or text materials for the study (or at
least reference glancing-at) of Seljuk Turkish, and-or any languages you
think may be similar? (Khazar? Oghuz? Tartar?).
thanks.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 11
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 16:21:07 -0700
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subterranea
On Apr 7, 2005 3:58 PM, Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> makes sense.
>
> though, if you're looking for energy sources...remember bacteria...they eat
> rocks, sulfur, oil...exhaling methane and various other gas.
>
Some even phosphoresce, along with some species of fungus. Not sure
how much light energy they can provide, though.
--
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
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
