There are 25 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: XSAMPA question
From: Philip Newton
1.2. Re: XSAMPA question
From: Philip Newton
1.3. Re: XSAMPA question
From: Larry Sulky
1.4. Re: XSAMPA question
From: Douglas Koller
2a. Re: Could you take quick look at this?
From: David McCann
2b. Re: Could you take quick look at this?
From: Gary Shannon
2c. Re: Could you take quick look at this?
From: Shair A
3a. Re: LLL idea
From: David McCann
3b. Re: LLL idea
From: Charlie
3c. Re: LLL idea
From: Alex Fink
3d. Re: LLL idea
From: And Rosta
3e. Re: LLL idea
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
3f. Re: LLL idea
From: Eugene Oh
3g. Re: LLL idea
From: kechpaja
3h. Re: LLL idea
From: Lars Finsen
4a. Re: Through the Language Glass - A Conlanger's Review
From: And Rosta
4b. Re: Through the Language Glass - A Conlanger's Review
From: Jim Henry
4c. Re: Through the Language Glass - A Conlanger's Review
From: And Rosta
5a. Re: New Zhyler Orthography Page
From: David Peterson
5b. Re: New Zhyler Orthography Page
From: Douglas Koller
6a. Re: Fonts with correct diacritic placement?
From: Josh Roth
6b. Re: Fonts with correct diacritic placement?
From: David McCann
7. Kunu Syllabary - Second Draft
From: Gary Shannon
8a. Re: TAKE revision - latest
From: MorphemeAddict
8b. Re: TAKE revision - latest
From: Philip Newton
Messages
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1.1. Re: XSAMPA question
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:50 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 12:53, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> given the obtuse stuff that primary school
> teachers normally teach about language, it wouldn't be surprising if the
> orthographic definition, or some mixed-up hybrid, won out.
Given the definition of "vowel" as "A E I O U and sometimes Y" (i.e.
an orthographic definition, and not a particularly useful one at that
given the "sometimes"), I wouldn't be surprised at very much these
days when it comes to linguistics in primary school education.
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (51)
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1.2. Re: XSAMPA question
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:51 am ((PDT))
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 17:13, Peter Collier <petecoll...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> The UK uses IPA in the main, including in school (or at least my school did in
> early to mid 80s, can't speak for everybody). Although I seem to recall some
> stuff in school might have used /a/ e/ /i/ /o/ and /u/ rather than the IPA
> equivalent of /{/ /E/ /O/ and /V/ - or maybe my memory's playing tricks on me?
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english.htm may be an
interesting read, on various ways the IPA has been used to represent
English phonemes.
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (51)
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1.3. Re: XSAMPA question
Posted by: "Larry Sulky" larrysu...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 11:40 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 6:37 AM, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 5:12 AM, Lars Finsen<lars.fin...@ortygia.no>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Interesting. Where in the English-speaking world is that vowel short?
>>> It's
>>> short in _doggie_, but much longer in _dog_ the way I think I've heard it
>>> -
>>> comparable to _door_. Even in _dogs_ the vowel is much longer than in
>>> _digs_
>>> the way I think I've heard it.
>>>
>>
>
> Larry Sulky, On 21/10/2010 19:40:
>
> In my 'lect, which is pretty close to GenAm, the "o" of "dog" and the "o"
>> of
>> "doggie" are identical, and are short. They are also the same vowel as the
>> "a" in "father".
>>
>
> If the "a" in "father" is the same phoneme as the "a" in "bra" and "spa",
> then it'd be by definition long (in the phonological sense of the long/short
> distinction pertinent to the vowel-underling exercise), since it can occur
> in stressed word-final positions.
> --And.
>
Sorry, I only meant "short" in the sense that Lars was using it in the post
I responded to. (Coincidentally[?] the same terminology -- "short o" -- is
used in grade school phonics in the US... or was in the 1960s, anyway.) You
are quite correct, And, the vowel is /a/ for all of "dog", "doggie",
"father", "bra", and "spa" in my 'lect. Also for "cot", "caught", "law", and
"not". Clearly, I'm not from Brooklyn.
--larry
Messages in this topic (51)
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1.4. Re: XSAMPA question
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" lao...@comcast.net
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:44 pm ((PDT))
----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <and.ro...@gmail.com>
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 8:41:51 AM
Subject: Re: XSAMPA question
>Kou:
>> Many years ago here on the list, I was humorously, deservedly, and
>> roundly taken out behind the shed, I remember not by whom, for using
>> an "as in" pronunciation example. I explained that the Géarthnuns
>> sound "öi" was "as in the 'euille' of "feuille" (commented my
>> chastiser, "or, why we should learn IPA.") I giggled myself to tears.
>> (Later, I found my quote on a
>> "can-you-believe-some-poor-schmuck-actually-said-this?" website,
>> thereby launching my gaffe in aeternitatem.
>Is any of that still online anywhere? I've googled but not found out. I do
>hope I wasn't the harsh excoriator! I do >remember my own enthusiasm for
>Gearthnuns "öi", though; to me, Gearthnuns has always looked and felt 'Right'.
The website is this:
http://www.blahedo.org/randsig.txt
the quote's about 2/3 of the way down.
1997 and pre-September 1998 archives, which may be when pre-IPA I may have
written the original, appear to have been vaporized, and I don't know how to
access that/those. Don Blaheta has immortalized the quote, so perhaps it was he
who originally responded to my former "as in" naïveté.
Meanwhile, And, thanks for the props with regards to Géarthnuns. Keep those
cards and letters comin'.
Kou
Messages in this topic (51)
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2a. Re: Could you take quick look at this?
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:52 am ((PDT))
On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 10:48 -0700, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Apparently some people are not seeing the embedded fonts in my new
> syllabary web page. Could you take a peek and see if the two lines of
> text in the box at the top of the page match in your browser?
Works fine with Opera 10.11 (on Fedora 10 Linux). Firefox 3.0.4 doesn't
work, but that's an old version.
Messages in this topic (17)
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2b. Re: Could you take quick look at this?
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" fizi...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:17 am ((PDT))
Thank you.
I almost always use some kind of grid to build glyphs on. My general
method is explained here: http://fiziwig.com/conlang/glyph/glyphs.html
For this syllabary I used a much smaller grid. Imagine two uppercase
block letters 'EE' with no space between them. That's the grid I used.
Each glyph is the result of omitting some of the lines in that "master
pattern" and rounding some of the corners in the middle (but not
corners on the left edge because they have to join). I also added a
curved descender from the middle vertical line, and a couple of glyphs
got a diagonal line added.
I'm not happy with the sounds assigned to each syllable yet. I'm going
to add a few more glyphs and then revisit the inventory of sounds and
probably completely redo it.
--gary
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 5:46 PM, M.S. Soderquist
<gloriouswaf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It worked fine for me in Chrome.
>
> I also liked the look of the syllabary. What was your creation process like?
>
> It took me 12 years to come up with a working syllabary for ea-luna. Some of
> my other languages have writing systems, but I think most of them look
> cobbled together. A clean, unified look, like what you've got there for
> Kunu, would be a nice change.
>
> Mia.
Messages in this topic (17)
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2c. Re: Could you take quick look at this?
Posted by: "Shair A" aeetlrcre...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:07 pm ((PDT))
It works fine in Chrome 8.0.552.11.
2010/10/22 Gary Shannon <fizi...@gmail.com>
> Thank you.
>
> I almost always use some kind of grid to build glyphs on. My general
> method is explained here: http://fiziwig.com/conlang/glyph/glyphs.html
>
> For this syllabary I used a much smaller grid. Imagine two uppercase
> block letters 'EE' with no space between them. That's the grid I used.
> Each glyph is the result of omitting some of the lines in that "master
> pattern" and rounding some of the corners in the middle (but not
> corners on the left edge because they have to join). I also added a
> curved descender from the middle vertical line, and a couple of glyphs
> got a diagonal line added.
>
> I'm not happy with the sounds assigned to each syllable yet. I'm going
> to add a few more glyphs and then revisit the inventory of sounds and
> probably completely redo it.
>
> --gary
>
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 5:46 PM, M.S. Soderquist
> <gloriouswaf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > It worked fine for me in Chrome.
> >
> > I also liked the look of the syllabary. What was your creation process
> like?
> >
> > It took me 12 years to come up with a working syllabary for ea-luna. Some
> of
> > my other languages have writing systems, but I think most of them look
> > cobbled together. A clean, unified look, like what you've got there for
> > Kunu, would be a nice change.
> >
> > Mia.
>
Messages in this topic (17)
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3a. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:58 am ((PDT))
On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 12:23 +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Object incorporation (arising from ellision), overproduction of [h], a
> few sound changes that aren't attested in any known romlang (eg sp, st,
> sk > b d g), and then take it from there.
Is voicing by a preceding /s/ attested in any known language? How would
it arise? Incidentally, I seem to remember that Tsakonian Greek has /st/
> /tÊ°/ etc, restoring the old three-contrast of /t tÊ° d/, at least
initially.
Messages in this topic (13)
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3b. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "Charlie" caeruleancent...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 8:11 am ((PDT))
--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Peter Bleackley <peter.bleack...@...> wrote:
>
> staving vii iiix:
> >> [snip]... by the Road Less Travelled"<
> >
> > Just a little OT, but you haven't played Morrowind have you?
> >
> No, it's just a common phrase that described my design goals.
>
> Pete
>
The reference, at least in American culture, is to the final lines of a poem by
Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken."
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Charlie
Messages in this topic (13)
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3c. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:02 am ((PDT))
On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:56:16 +0100, David McCann <da...@polymathy.plus.com>
wrote:
>On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 12:23 +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
>> Object incorporation (arising from ellision), overproduction of [h], a
>> few sound changes that aren't attested in any known romlang (eg sp, st,
>> sk > b d g), and then take it from there.
>
>Is voicing by a preceding /s/ attested in any known language? How would
>it arise?
Puts me in mind of deaspiration after /s/, as in e.g. English or Icelandic
or Scottish Gaelic or Welsh, so that it falls in with the reflexes of the
old voiced series. (Scottish Gaelic writes <sp st sg>, and Welsh <sb st sg>,
for these clusters.)
But that's not voicing; and you'd need aspiration on onset /p t k/ to pull
that off to begin with (maybe you have that, if there's overproduction of
[h]? cf. Catullus 84's _chommoda_), and probably aspiration taking
precedence over voicing then [s] loss then voicing becoming the important
one again to get your ultimate outcome.
Alex
Messages in this topic (13)
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3d. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:05 am ((PDT))
David McCann, On 22/10/2010 15:56:
> On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 12:23 +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
>> Object incorporation (arising from ellision), overproduction of [h], a
>> few sound changes that aren't attested in any known romlang (eg sp, st,
>> sk> b d g), and then take it from there.
>
> Is voicing by a preceding /s/ attested in any known language?
I don't know, but:
> How would it arise?
IMO English 'sp,st,sk' clusters are actually /sb,sd,sg/, so if the /s/ were
lost, you'd end up with /b,d,g/. I don't know enough about Romance to know if
that analysis cd make sense for Romance too, tho.
--And.
Messages in this topic (13)
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3e. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:15 am ((PDT))
Hallo!
On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:23:38 +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> On 22/10/2010 11:38, Eugene Oh wrote:
> > In this kind of situation, a lonely valley in the Alps is always a
> > good idea. Switzerland Austria Liechtenstein etc.?
> >
> > What features are you thinking of?
> >
>
> Object incorporation (arising from ellision), overproduction of [h], a
> few sound changes that aren't attested in any known romlang (eg sp, st,
> sk > b d g), and then take it from there.
Object incorporation may be possible, but it would be unusual for
a European language (I assume that your romlang is somewhere in or
near Europe, otherwise it would be difficult to get the Romans
there). Object-incorporating languages are mostly found in areas
like North America or eastern Siberia, where it is unlikely that
any Romans ever got there, and even less likely that their
language would survive.
The sound change of the type /sp/ > /b/ looks unlikely to me;
I'd rather expect something like /sp/ > /f/ etc.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
Messages in this topic (13)
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3f. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "Eugene Oh" un.do...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:20 am ((PDT))
2010/10/22 And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com>
>
> IMO English 'sp,st,sk' clusters are actually /sb,sd,sg/, so if the /s/ were
> lost, you'd end up with /b,d,g/. I don't know enough about Romance to know
> if that analysis cd make sense for Romance too, tho.
>
>
I'm interested in this analysis. Tell us more?
Eugene
Messages in this topic (13)
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3g. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "kechpaja" kechp...@comcast.net
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:29 am ((PDT))
On Oct 22, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Eugene Oh wrote:
> 2010/10/22 And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com>
>
>>
>> IMO English 'sp,st,sk' clusters are actually /sb,sd,sg/, so if the /s/ were
>> lost, you'd end up with /b,d,g/. I don't know enough about Romance to know
>> if that analysis cd make sense for Romance too, tho.
I don't think it would. This analysis is based on the primary contrastive
feature of English "voiced/unvoiced" stops being aspiration rather than actual
voice, and thus, since in the aforementioned clusters the stop component is
unaspirated, it can be analyzed as "voiced". However, Romance language stops
tend to contrast primarily voicing, with unvoiced stops being unaspirated.
Messages in this topic (13)
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3h. Re: LLL idea
Posted by: "Lars Finsen" lars.fin...@ortygia.no
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:32 am ((PDT))
Den 22. okt. 2010 kl. 18.11 skreiv Jörg Rhiemeier:
>
> The sound change of the type /sp/ > /b/ looks unlikely to me;
Why? You only need two steps: /sp/ > /p/ > /b/
Of course, both of these will have consequences for the rest of the
inventory as well. Will the s be dropped everywhere, or is it only
initial or before certain (all?) consonants? What about other
sibilants? If the second one is a lenition, will other stops be
lenited, too, and in all positions, or just some? Or is it a
different process?
LEF
Messages in this topic (13)
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4a. Re: Through the Language Glass - A Conlanger's Review
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 8:29 am ((PDT))
Jim Henry, On 21/10/2010 01:50:
> 2. How common is it to have pronoun gender without noun gender? As
> far as I can tell at a quick skim, WALS features 30-32 talk only about
> noun gender as evidenced by agreement of other word classes with nouns
> of different types. Engelangs and auxlangs in particular seem apt to
> have pronoun gender without noun gender, but I'm not sure it's
> unnatural per se, though it seems uncommon. English has pronoun
> gender with only faint vestiges of noun gender (e.g., calling ships
> "she" and having different sex-based agentive nominalizations such as
> "actor" and "actress" (many pairs like "aviator" and "aviatrix" have
> lost the feminine version, making the masculine version epicene in
> current English)).
Especially in an engelang context, I'd ask how to tell the difference between
nouns and pronouns; one wouldn't necessarily expect such a distinction in an
engelang.
And more generally, what counts as a grammatical gender system? I would have
said that agreement is criterial -- and I've just checked in Corbett's _Gender_
via Google Books, and he says the same. So English doesn't have pronoun gender,
and probably Naeso doesn't either. What could a system with pronoun gender but
not noun gender look like, given that gender is agreement-based?
--And.
Messages in this topic (11)
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4b. Re: Through the Language Glass - A Conlanger's Review
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 9:49 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 11:23 AM, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim Henry, On 21/10/2010 01:50:
>> 2. How common is it to have pronoun gender without noun gender? As
> Especially in an engelang context, I'd ask how to tell the difference
> between nouns and pronouns; one wouldn't necessarily expect such a
> distinction in an engelang.
Well, perhaps not; with engelangs, all bets are off. But with
comparatively naturalistic engelangs, you'd not be surprised to see a
class of words sharing several or even all of these properties with
typical natlang pronouns:
1. anaphoric or cataphoric, with their reference more highly context
dependent than that of the typical noun;
2. marked for some category analogous to "person", i.e. whether their
referent is a discourse participant and if so, whether speaker/writer
or listener/reader
3. a closed class, vs. nouns in the same language being open-class (if
only by derivation from verbs in a verb-oriented engelang like
Voksigid);
4. having different syntactic distribution or allowing/requiring
different morphological marking than (other) nouns
At a guess, I'd say the latter properties are less likely to be found
in engelangs' pronouns than in those of natlangs. gzb has a class
with properties #1 and #2 and maybe #3, to a lesser extent #4 -- root
pronouns are a closed class, but derived pronouns are open-class; and
personal pronouns, when in certain thematic roles, can incorporate
into verbs, as nouns in those roles can't.
> And more generally, what counts as a grammatical gender system? I would have
> said that agreement is criterial -- and I've just checked in Corbett's
> _Gender_ via Google Books, and he says the same. So English doesn't have
> pronoun gender, and probably Naeso doesn't either.
In what grammatical category do "he", "she", and "it" differ, then?
They're the same in person, case, and number, and the difference
between them doesn't look like definiteness or any other category
usually associated with nouns/pronouns. Some linguists (I think I
first saw this in John Lyons, but I can't find the reference now)
consider gender in English a crypto-category, requiring pronoun
agreement but not adjective agreement and rarely marked on the noun
itself. But I gather that's a minority usage, given how few of the
Ghits for "crypto-category" have to do with linguistics rather than
crypography.
Maybe we need a new term for the category English third-person
singular pronouns are marked for. Since it's semantically based on
sex and animacy (with minor exceptions like "she" for ships and "it"
for babies in some dialects), some variation on "gender" seems like a
good idea, though maybe not "gender" tout court if that's reserved for
describing a primarily nominal category that requires agreement
marking on words of one or more other lexical categories. Maybe
"semantic pronominal gender"? That seems too unwieldy. "Pronoun
class", by analogy with "noun class"? Maybe too vague.
> What could a system with
> pronoun gender but not noun gender look like, given that gender is
> agreement-based?
If a pronoun system has pronouns inflected or otherwise varying for
some category other than person, number, case, and definiteness, and
it's not obvious what else to call that category, I'd be inclined to
call it gender, even if nouns aren't morphologically marked for the
same category in the given language.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (11)
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4c. Re: Through the Language Glass - A Conlanger's Review
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Oct 23, 2010 3:26 am ((PDT))
[Resending this; it was rejected by the list server in order to stem my sudden
hesternal effusion of loquacity.]
Jim Henry, On 22/10/2010 17:45:
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 11:23 AM, And Rosta<and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jim Henry, On 21/10/2010 01:50:
>>> 2. How common is it to have pronoun gender without noun gender? As
>
>> Especially in an engelang context, I'd ask how to tell the difference
>> between nouns and pronouns; one wouldn't necessarily expect such a
>> distinction in an engelang.
>
> Well, perhaps not; with engelangs, all bets are off. But with
> comparatively naturalistic engelangs, you'd not be surprised to see a
> class of words sharing several or even all of these properties with
> typical natlang pronouns:
>
> 1. anaphoric or cataphoric, with their reference more highly context
> dependent than that of the typical noun;
>
> 2. marked for some category analogous to "person", i.e. whether their
> referent is a discourse participant and if so, whether speaker/writer
> or listener/reader
>
> 3. a closed class, vs. nouns in the same language being open-class (if
> only by derivation from verbs in a verb-oriented engelang like
> Voksigid);
>
> 4. having different syntactic distribution or allowing/requiring
> different morphological marking than (other) nouns
>
> At a guess, I'd say the latter properties are less likely to be found
> in engelangs' pronouns than in those of natlangs. gzb has a class
> with properties #1 and #2 and maybe #3, to a lesser extent #4 -- root
> pronouns are a closed class, but derived pronouns are open-class; and
> personal pronouns, when in certain thematic roles, can incorporate
> into verbs, as nouns in those roles can't.
That's a good answer, characteristically Jacobohenrician.
#1 and probably #2 are characteristic also of determiners, but in themselves
they're not sufficient to define a formally distinct class (whether the class
is Pronoun or Pronoun-Determiner). (By 'formally' I mean 'recognized by the
grammar' rather than 'in terms of form'.) #3 is vacuous if you haven't yet
established that the pronoun class exists in the first place.#4 is the crux.
>> And more generally, what counts as a grammatical gender system? I would have
>> said that agreement is criterial -- and I've just checked in Corbett's
>> _Gender_ via Google Books, and he says the same. So English doesn't have
>> pronoun gender, and probably Naeso doesn't either.
>
> In what grammatical category do "he", "she", and "it" differ, then?
> They're the same in person, case, and number, and the difference
> between them doesn't look like definiteness or any other category
> usually associated with nouns/pronouns.
One plausible answer is that they differ in no grammatical category, and the
difference is purely lexical. In him/her vs it there might be a case for a
grammatical distinction between human/nonhuman, reflected in who vs what/which,
Q-one/body vs Q-thing, except that him/her is not really restricted to humans,
and the use of "it" for babies indicates that salient genderedness is more
criterial than humanness.
In my own analysis of how English truly works, I take him/her/it to be
phonological manifestations of the syntactic phrases "the male/female/thing",
so the difference is essentially lexical, but the lexical difference (obtaining
at the level of syntax) is not between different pronouns/determiners.
> Maybe we need a new term for the category English third-person
> singular pronouns are marked for. Since it's semantically based on
> sex and animacy (with minor exceptions like "she" for ships and "it"
> for babies in some dialects), some variation on "gender" seems like a
> good idea, though maybe not "gender" tout court if that's reserved for
> describing a primarily nominal category that requires agreement
> marking on words of one or more other lexical categories. Maybe
> "semantic pronominal gender"? That seems too unwieldy. "Pronoun
> class", by analogy with "noun class"? Maybe too vague.
Fair point. So there'd be one term for "noun class system triggering agreement"
and another for "grammaticalization of sex distinctions".
>> What could a system with pronoun gender but not noun gender look
>> like, given that gender is agreement-based?
>
> If a pronoun system has pronouns inflected or otherwise varying for
> some category other than person, number, case, and definiteness, and
> it's not obvious what else to call that category, I'd be inclined to
> call it gender, even if nouns aren't morphologically marked for the
> same category in the given language.
Given the lack of an established term for "grammaticalization of sex
distinctions", I can see why you'd want to do that. But I think it is
profitable to distinguish that notion from "noun class system triggering
agreement", and confounding not to.
--And.
Messages in this topic (11)
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5a. Re: New Zhyler Orthography Page
Posted by: "David Peterson" deda...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 3:37 pm ((PDT))
On Oct 22, 2010, at 7â05 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
> I've stopped being able to tell the capital [g] and [k], and [G] and [x],
> letters apart. For the fricatives I see you've actually put á for
> both of them. Maybe that's intended, given your word-final devoicing and
> that [x G] are intervocalic only (... so are their capitals actually ever
> used?). But I thought there used to be some subtle stroke width difference
> kind of thing.
There was, originally, a difference, but I never intended for there to be.
The capital letters for the velars are supposed to be identical. As for
when the capitals are used, they're used when writing in all caps. :)
All caps is a stylistic variant used in signage and other places meant
to look official (modeled after the Sathir script, which has no lower case
letters [kind of]).
(Note: The above counts as my obconlang. It's concultural!)
> Oh, and doesn't your _Sexa amËar amlar_ example have a stray "s" after the
> "Ë"?
Fixed. This also, though, shows how I'm not using unique unicode characters
for the font. I'm not yet convinced that there's full support for the private
use area,
so I just use standard code points plus extras. For a website, though, I think
this
makes sense. Since you have to enter unicode codes for non-ASCII characters,
minimizing the number of those for which you need to seems ideal.
> And my Firefox is rendering in the page your end comment marks --> where
> you've commented out the old graphics in the later section. I suppose this
> is because you've got two <!--s, in view of this SGML stupidity:
> http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/SGMLComments.html
Fixed, hopefully. (Don't know how I got doubles on there... Must have been an
accident.)
-David
*******************************************************************
"Sunlü eleÅ¡karez ügrallerüf üjjixelye ye oxömeyze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.com/
LCS Member Since 2007
http://conlang.org/
Messages in this topic (6)
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5b. Re: New Zhyler Orthography Page
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" lao...@comcast.net
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:11 pm ((PDT))
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Peterson" <deda...@gmail.com>
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 5:10:58 AM
Subject: New Zhyler Orthography Page
>So the recent discussion of X-SAMPA, which led to a short
>discussion of font embedding, led me to a series of resources
>which have allowed me to (finally!) embed fonts in my site. Part
>one of the massive site overhaul this new knowledge has led
>me to enact has been completed: a redone Zhyler orthography
>page. You can view it below:
> http://dedalvs.com/zhyler/orthography.html
Plus ça change...
I discovered quite a while ago that, while different in printed forms,
Teonaht's cursive "õ" was the same as Géarthnuns' cursive "kf"; in both printed
and cursive forms, Teonaht's "k" was Géarthnuns' "ch" (/tS/) (well, it's
basically the letter "x", so I imagine a number of other alphabets have this
symbol). I can't speak to the origins of the Teonaht, but the Géarthnuns "ch"
is an unabashed coöpting of the Greek "chi", onto which I, as a high-schooler,
glommed the English "ch" value -- not the "ch" of "chemistry", not the "ch" of
"loch", not the "ch" of "pastiche", but the "ch" of "church". An adolescent
choice, perhaps, but I'm not revamping after these thirty years in. Meanwhile,
for a /x/ sound, Géarthnuns has the "ch" letter, "x", with a 'tilde' over it.
The 'tilde' is the only superscript consonant, having the value of /h/. It was
meant as a (again adolescent, a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing) riff on
the Greek rough breathing. Used over vowels. But then I plunked it on "ch", so
"chh" or "hch" became /x/ or "kh" in the romanization. No rough breathing rho,
whatever that sounded like, but the letter "rh" has tilde-esque flourishes on
it. "rh" is syllable initial and "kh" is syllable final, so I like it. But I
have woefully digressed.
With regard to Zhyler, its /a/ is the same as Géarthnuns' /a/, written as an
upside down "v" (though in Géarthnuns, the heavier stroke would be on the
right, not the left). Again, take the "Way-Back Machine" to high school, take
the Phoenician " 'alep " from page one of the "A" section in the Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary, and instead of turning it clockwise to 12:00 to get
"alpha" (point up), turn counter-clockwise to 6:00 (point down). Over time, the
central bar dissolves (though it remains in a Fraktur-y version of the script).
One wonders how many overlaps in (con)alphabets like this occur. Géarthnuns'
"s" looks like (well, *is*) "o", initial and medial lower-case sigma without
the tail; "z" looks like "ó" (the superscript marks voicing, like the marker "
in Japanese (mind you, *this* device was developed well before I knew squat
about Japanese)). Zhyler's "u". Surely, other conalphabets out there have a
circle representing some value.
Just found it interesting.
Kou
Messages in this topic (6)
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6a. Re: Fonts with correct diacritic placement?
Posted by: "Josh Roth" tan...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 6:39 pm ((PDT))
On Oct 22, 2010, at 11:41 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> On 22 October 2010 11:03, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_w...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:04:22 +0200, Josh Roth <tan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I just checked these, and the placement of the horn is off in both. If you
>> compare
>>> <aÌ> or <iÌ> with <Æ¡>, for example, you can see the difference. Unless it
>> looks
>>> different on different computers somehow?
>>
>> It does. The rendering of diacritics like these is normally achieved by
>> smart OpenType features (alternatively, by AAT or Graphite). OpenType
>> capabilities typically depend from applications to application.
>
>
> Yes. By definition of their specification, how to show OpenType smart
> features is left to the application showing the font. AFAIK, Graphite is
> different in that it actually includes *programs* that *tell* the
> application how to show a specific feature. So Graphite smart features
> should look the same no matter the application (at least in an ideal world).
> OpenType features don't have to. I don't know how AAT features fare, but
> AFAIK they work similarly to OpenType smart features.
>
>
>> Microsoft
>> Word is especially known for its lack of any smart rendering. For what I
>> know, this has changed since Microsoft Word 2010. There are other
>> applications with better OpenType capabilities. OOo does Graphite. Many Mac
>> applications do AAT.
>>
>>
> XeTeX (a Unicode-aware version of TeX with very advanced font support)
> supports both OpenType and AAT. I'm not sure about Graphite, but I think it
> does have some support as well.
> --
> Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
>
> http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
> http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Oh man. I had no idea about this stuff - I naively thought that once you choose
a font, it will look the same anywhere. I'm using a Mac, and I see now that if
I type in Mellel, DejaVu Sans actually does what I want. Unfortunately though,
it doesn't display properly in the applications I usually type in, like
TextEdit and DevonThink. In Firefox the horns display ok with DejaVu, but many
other diacritics are placed way too far to one side or the other, so that
they're actually closer to the next character. In BBEdit, DejaVu generally
looks right, but some letter + diacritic combinations are off. Other than this
issue, I'm pretty happy with the applications I'm using now - do I have any
options besides switching to different ones, or creating a custom font?
Josh
tanuef.110mb.com
Messages in this topic (8)
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6b. Re: Fonts with correct diacritic placement?
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Sat Oct 23, 2010 4:49 am ((PDT))
On Sat, 2010-10-23 at 03:36 +0200, Josh Roth wrote:
> Oh man. I had no idea about this stuff - I naively thought that once you
> choose a font, it will look the same anywhere. I'm using a Mac, and I see now
> that if I type in Mellel, DejaVu Sans actually does what I want.
> Unfortunately though, it doesn't display properly in the applications I
> usually type in, like TextEdit and DevonThink. In Firefox the horns display
> ok with DejaVu, but many other diacritics are placed way too far to one side
> or the other, so that they're actually closer to the next character. In
> BBEdit, DejaVu generally looks right, but some letter + diacritic
> combinations are off. Other than this issue, I'm pretty happy with the
> applications I'm using now - do I have any options besides switching to
> different ones, or creating a custom font?
Unfortunately, there is no real solution to getting combining diacritics
right. Even if you use OpenType with Linux or Windows, or AAT with the
Mac, that depends on your software knowing how to use the advanced
features. The only infallible method of getting diacritics to fit is to
use precomposed characters, and even that depends on the font getting it
right. If you need something new like a-horn for a conlang, make your
own in the private use area. I've added a set of vowels with both breve
and macron, and f and θ with circumflexes, for example.
Messages in this topic (8)
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7. Kunu Syllabary - Second Draft
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" fizi...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 22, 2010 6:54 pm ((PDT))
The syllabary now has 64 character symbols along with some punctuation
symbols and two diacritics that I thought I might use to indicated
voicing of the initial consonant. That way I can have a single symbol
for pa/ba and just put the diacritic on it for ba.
I haven't tackled the font embedding problems yet, so for this second
draft I've just put it in a PDF document. These are just the 64
symbols. I haven't actually assigned sounds to the symbols yet.
The next step will probably be laying out a set of 128 syllables (64
without diacritic and the same 64 with diacritic). There's no reason
why I MUST fill all 128 slots. There could well be 15 or 20 or 25 or
30 syllables that don't take the diacritic for some reason. So there
might only be 80 or 100 actual syllables in the final inventory.
Comments are welcome, as well as suggestions for what sort of syllable
inventory would be interesting.
The symbols with their keymap is at
http://fiziwig.com/conlang/kunu/kunu_syllabary.pdf
--gary
Messages in this topic (1)
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8a. Re: TAKE revision - latest
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" lytl...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Oct 23, 2010 12:50 am ((PDT))
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Henrik <theil...@absint.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Poor Ιωσήφ Πεάνου!
>
Henrik,
What do the numbers mean?
stevo
Messages in this topic (5)
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8b. Re: TAKE revision - latest
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Oct 23, 2010 3:56 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 9:37 AM, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Henrik <theil...@absint.com> wrote:
>
>> Poor Ιωσήφ Πεάνου!
>>
> Henrik,
> What do the numbers mean?
They're XML/SGML/HTML numeric entity references for "ÉùóÞö ÐåÜíïõ".
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (5)
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