There are 14 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Diacritics
From: Lars Finsen
1.2. Re: Diacritics
From: Andreas Johansson
1.3. Re: Diacritics
From: Shea Olivier
1.4. Re: Diacritics
From: R A Brown
1.5. Re: Diacritics
From: Roger Mills
2a. Re: Exquisite Corpse
From: Peter Bleackley
2b. Re: Exquisite Corpse
From: Alex Fink
2c. Exquisite Corpse
From: Samuel Stutter
3a. Re: Font/word-processing question
From: Matthew Turnbull
3b. Re: Font/word-processing question
From: Samuel Stutter
3c. Re: Font/word-processing question
From: Larry Sulky
3d. Re: Font/word-processing question
From: Matthew Turnbull
4a. Re: Exquisite corpse
From: Dale McCreery
5. Has anyone heard from Lila Sadkin recently?
From: Peter Bleackley
Messages
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1.1. Re: Diacritics
Posted by: "Lars Finsen" lars.fin...@ortygia.no
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 7:38 am ((PST))
Den 29. nov. 2010 kl. 15.01 skreiv R A Brown:
> The Greek scriptures were around (and still are) for some time
> before a Latin version of the scriptures became authorized in the
> 4th century CE. The Greek Old testament had been around about 600
> years by then,
You mean 400?
LEF
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.2. Re: Diacritics
Posted by: "Andreas Johansson" andre...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 7:46 am ((PST))
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Lars Finsen <lars.fin...@ortygia.no> wrote:
> Den 29. nov. 2010 kl. 15.01 skreiv R A Brown:
>
>> The Greek scriptures were around (and still are) for some time before a
>> Latin version of the scriptures became authorized in the 4th century CE.
>> The Greek Old testament had been around about 600 years by then,
>
> You mean 400?
No. The "Old Testament", in this context perhaps better called the
Hebrew Bible, was translated into Greek long before the New was
written.
--
Andreas Johansson
Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.3. Re: Diacritics
Posted by: "Shea Olivier" xephy...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 8:54 am ((PST))
It can be said of diacritic-free languages like Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu etc.
> etc. The fact that one cannot always figure out the pronunciation of
> English is nothing whatsoever to with the lack of diacritics - as many of
> the hundreds of proposals for English spelling reform demonstrate.
>
A minor note: Swahili isn't tonal. Nor, I believe, does it have any
phonological complications that aren't marked in its orthography.
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.4. Re: Diacritics
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 9:07 am ((PST))
On 29/11/2010 14:28, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 3:01 PM, R A
> Brown<r...@carolandray.plus.com> wrote: [snip]
>> As I see it, diacritics have come to have two uses: (a)
>> to denote various prosodic features, e.g. pitch, tone,
>> irregular stress (the reason why they were first
>> invented). (b) to be added to letters to denote
>> different sounds (e.g. the circumflex in Esperanto).
>>
>> Both these things can be done, of course, be done by
>> the use of digraphs (or trigraphs) and this, for those
>> with impaired eyesight, is surely preferable.
>>
>> IMO their use for (b) is a poor choice compared with
>> that of adding another distinct letter.
>
> Salience is not the only criterion, of course, but I'm
> not sure I accept that separate letters are more easily
> distinguished than diacritics in practice.
>
> Is, frex, _u_ more distinct from _a_ than _ä_ is? Not in
> my handwriting at any rate!
Handwriting, I think, is a whole different area. In some
people's handwriting almost everything is difficult to
distinguish!
But, you have a point. Any new letter has to be carefully
chosen.
> Also, the use of the same diacritic on different letters
> allows to hint at phonological systemicity more easily
> than inventing new letters. Consider, say, German _ä ö ü_
> v. _a o u_ - replacing the former three with novel
> letters that still hint at the relationship with one
> another and with the later set isn't trivial.
If you use different - and the obvious one, I guess, would
be _e ø y_ the symmetry is lost. I know that, in theory,
there is a difference of pronunciation between _e_ and _ä_,
but IME there isn't in practice. I think ø can be considered
as a separate letter.
Of course once the German sounds were written _ae oe ue_ -
the 'umlaut' (two dots) was originally a small _e_ written
above the vowel.
But the German case IMO is marginal to my argument. Also in
languages that use only or two diacritics, the eye-sight
problem is not really relevant. In German an _o_ with a
smudge on top must be ö.
The problem, it seems to me, is when a language may use two
or three (or more) different diacritics over the same letter
with different meaning.
Diacritics
> seems like a good idea to me whenever we want featural,
> er, features in a basically alphabetical script.
>
>> (a) above IMO is the "proper" use of diacritics, but
>> the symbols are, probably, better displayed either to
>> the right or left of the symbol to which the prosody is
>> attached.
>
> I didn't see Gary's private reply, but I'm not sure why.
> If, as he seemed to suggest in an earlier mail, the
> problem is that they're small and easily missed, the
> solution would seem to be bigger, more salient symbols,
That's called "large print' :)
-----------------------------------------------
On 29/11/2010 15:43, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Lars
> Finsen<lars.fin...@ortygia.no> wrote:
>> Den 29. nov. 2010 kl. 15.01 skreiv R A Brown:
>>
>>> The Greek scriptures were around (and still are) for
>>> some time before a Latin version of the scriptures
>>> became authorized in the 4th century CE. The Greek
>>> Old testament had been around about 600 years by
>>> then,
>>
>> You mean 400?
Indeed, I don't.
> No. The "Old Testament", in this context perhaps better
> called the Hebrew Bible,
I was thinking in terms of the Christian Greek scriptures,
as the email to which I was replying referred to the Latin
(Christian) scriptures. But sure, if one talking about a
date BCE, then calling the Septuagint 'The Greek Old
Testament' is an anachronism. But then 'Hebrew Bible' is
not actually correct either. The 'Jewish Greek scriptures'
or, perhaps, the most neutral name is the _Septuagint_ .
> was translated into Greek long
> before the New was written.
Yep - they surely were. And the date I was comparing them
with was the 4th century CE. The earliest part of the
Septuagint dates back to the 3rd century BCE, i.e. about 700
years before. But the later books were added during the 2nd
century BCE, i.e. about 600 years before - the latter is
what I wrote.
Some of the later Septuagint books were not accepted in the
Hebrew cannon adopted at Council of Jamnia - so Hebrew Bible
is not accurate.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"Ein Kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt,
wird immer Eingriffe in die Sprache thun."
[J.G. Hamann, 1760]
"A mind that thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language".
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.5. Re: Diacritics
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 8:50 pm ((PST))
A language that would be helped with a diacritic (and used to be, pre-1972) is
Indonesian, which uses "e" for both schwa as well as [e] and (rare, mostly
conditioned) [E]. Formerly, [e,E] were marked with an acute. I assume standard
Malay has the same, or a similar problem-- in that case, I think schwa was
a-breve before the "unified" spelling reforms of 1972.
Messages in this topic (29)
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2a. Re: Exquisite Corpse
Posted by: "Peter Bleackley" peter.bleack...@rd.bbc.co.uk
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 8:37 am ((PST))
On 29/11/2010 15:08, Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 01:32:58PM +0000, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
>> A reminder of the rules - you will receive a sentence in a conlang and
>> the information you need to translate it. After translating it, write a
>> sentence that follows on from it in your own conlang, and send that, and
>> the relevant information, to your successor. Do not send on the sentence
>> you received.
>
> Where should we send our official copy of our decipherment of the sentence
> we received and our new sentence with its intended translation for posterity?
> If we wait till the end to put these up someplace, someone will inevitably
> have gone unreachable in the meantime.
>
It's best to send it to me, offlist.
Pete
Messages in this topic (5)
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2b. Re: Exquisite Corpse
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 11:32 am ((PST))
I made a Frath page so we can better keep track of the game status: who has
the sentence as present, additions and dropouts, etc.
http://wiki.frath.net/Conlang_Exquisite_Corpse
I encourage everyone to update it when they've finished their turn.
Alex
Messages in this topic (5)
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2c. Exquisite Corpse
Posted by: "Samuel Stutter" sam.stut...@student.manchester.ac.uk
Date: Tue Nov 30, 2010 4:13 am ((PST))
Concerning progress, I have received the sentence, the meerkats are in the bag
and operation hairbrush is a go.
In other words, it's with me at the moment and I will have sent it on by the
end of today.
Messages in this topic (5)
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3a. Re: Font/word-processing question
Posted by: "Matthew Turnbull" ave....@gmail.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 10:58 am ((PST))
I just realized that at least some left-handed people do this also, they
turn the page and write top to bottom right to left, then to read what they
wrote turn the page 90 degrees counterclockwise to read it. I think it's
motivated by three things, 1) they would smudge it otherwise 2)they're arm
tends to get in the way of reading what they just wrote more if they don't
turn the page, and 3) the middle line of a binder will be in your way
otherwise, and that's what most people end up writing in all through
highschool. I noticed it a while ago when my ex-girlfriend and my cousin
were teaching my grandma how to use her left hand to write, since her right
one shakes too much now.
On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:29 AM, David McCann <da...@polymathy.plus.com>wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-11-23 at 18:46 -0500, MorphemeAddict wrote:
> > Write it left to right and top to bottom, and then turn it upside down.
>
> There's a almost real-world precedent here. Mongolian is written
> downwards, but it's derived, via Sogdian, from Syriac, which is
> right-to-left. It seems Sogdian scribes wrote downwards (presumably to
> avoid smudging) and turn the text to read.
>
Messages in this topic (18)
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3b. Re: Font/word-processing question
Posted by: "Samuel Stutter" sam.stut...@student.manchester.ac.uk
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 11:11 am ((PST))
As a lefty, I was encouraged to turn the page while at school. As well as not
smudging, it makes it much easier to write cursive, particularly producing the
right slant. Chiefly, it places the hand in a much more comfortable position
for forming characters. It may (or may not) have something to do (personally)
with producing the characteristic "Catholic" s (perhaps itself a myth)
On 29 Nov 2010, at 18:52, Matthew Turnbull <ave....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just realized that at least some left-handed people do this also, they
> turn the page and write top to bottom right to left, then to read what they
> wrote turn the page 90 degrees counterclockwise to read it. I think it's
> motivated by three things, 1) they would smudge it otherwise 2)they're arm
> tends to get in the way of reading what they just wrote more if they don't
> turn the page, and 3) the middle line of a binder will be in your way
> otherwise, and that's what most people end up writing in all through
> highschool. I noticed it a while ago when my ex-girlfriend and my cousin
> were teaching my grandma how to use her left hand to write, since her right
> one shakes too much now.
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:29 AM, David McCann
> <da...@polymathy.plus.com>wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2010-11-23 at 18:46 -0500, MorphemeAddict wrote:
>>> Write it left to right and top to bottom, and then turn it upside down.
>>
>> There's a almost real-world precedent here. Mongolian is written
>> downwards, but it's derived, via Sogdian, from Syriac, which is
>> right-to-left. It seems Sogdian scribes wrote downwards (presumably to
>> avoid smudging) and turn the text to read.
>>
Messages in this topic (18)
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3c. Re: Font/word-processing question
Posted by: "Larry Sulky" larrysu...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 11:56 am ((PST))
My son, a lefty, rights from left to right... BOTTOM to TOP! He turns the
page slightly counterclockwise to write. And his handwriting is very odd and
beautiful. His sister, also a lefty, thinks he's nuts.
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Samuel Stutter <
sam.stut...@student.manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> As a lefty, I was encouraged to turn the page while at school. As well as
> not smudging, it makes it much easier to write cursive, particularly
> producing the right slant. Chiefly, it places the hand in a much more
> comfortable position for forming characters. It may (or may not) have
> something to do (personally) with producing the characteristic "Catholic" s
> (perhaps itself a myth)
>
>
>
> On 29 Nov 2010, at 18:52, Matthew Turnbull <ave....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I just realized that at least some left-handed people do this also, they
> > turn the page and write top to bottom right to left, then to read what
> they
> > wrote turn the page 90 degrees counterclockwise to read it. I think it's
> > motivated by three things, 1) they would smudge it otherwise 2)they're
> arm
> > tends to get in the way of reading what they just wrote more if they
> don't
> > turn the page, and 3) the middle line of a binder will be in your way
> > otherwise, and that's what most people end up writing in all through
> > highschool. I noticed it a while ago when my ex-girlfriend and my cousin
> > were teaching my grandma how to use her left hand to write, since her
> right
> > one shakes too much now.
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:29 AM, David McCann <da...@polymathy.plus.com
> >wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, 2010-11-23 at 18:46 -0500, MorphemeAddict wrote:
> >>> Write it left to right and top to bottom, and then turn it upside down.
> >>
> >> There's a almost real-world precedent here. Mongolian is written
> >> downwards, but it's derived, via Sogdian, from Syriac, which is
> >> right-to-left. It seems Sogdian scribes wrote downwards (presumably to
> >> avoid smudging) and turn the text to read.
> >>
>
Messages in this topic (18)
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3d. Re: Font/word-processing question
Posted by: "Matthew Turnbull" ave....@gmail.com
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 9:32 pm ((PST))
How very odd, and interessting!
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Larry Sulky <larrysu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My son, a lefty, rights from left to right... BOTTOM to TOP! He turns the
> page slightly counterclockwise to write. And his handwriting is very odd
> and
> beautiful. His sister, also a lefty, thinks he's nuts.
>
>
Messages in this topic (18)
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4a. Re: Exquisite corpse
Posted by: "Dale McCreery" mccre...@uvic.ca
Date: Mon Nov 29, 2010 11:21 am ((PST))
Count me in as well
> I'm in!
>
> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 9:36 AM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I don't think there's a need to organise any manner of set interval:
>> the
>> > sentence will only pass through your hands once, and you can take your
>> time
>> > with it. I assume the passing will be done offlist, to prevent
>> everyone
>>
>> We should have some way of noticing when it gets stuck, though.
>> Probably have people post a brief message here, or on the relay list,
>> when they send their sentence to the next person, and if we go a few
>> days without such a post, ask the last person who got a sentence if
>> they've passed their own sentence to someone else yet...?
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jim Henry
>> http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
>>
>
Messages in this topic (25)
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5. Has anyone heard from Lila Sadkin recently?
Posted by: "Peter Bleackley" peter.bleack...@rd.bbc.co.uk
Date: Tue Nov 30, 2010 3:26 am ((PST))
Is anyone in touch with Lila Sadkin, the author of Tenata? She seems to
have been out of contact since the Second Inverse Relay.
Pete
Messages in this topic (1)
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