The other day there was an exchange on the Conlang mailing list
about hidden references to Tolkien in people’s conlangs.
Garth Wallace wrote:
Daniel Bowman wrote: » For example, Samadurian actually
comes » from mangling “cellar door”, > Is that a hidden
reference to Tolkien? ;-)
Yes indeed! That’s the only relation, though; the milieu it’s
intended for is very un-Tolkeinesque.
To which I replied:
mercurii
dies ‘Wednesday’
used to be melcordí in Rhodrese, which of course was
an oblique reference to Tolkien (and one which Tolkien would
perhaps not have liked very much!). In the current version of the
lang the form is meocordí, and thus not that obvious
anymore, if you aren’t aware of the change of non-prevocalic /l/ to
/w/.
Ah, creative help! The mention of **melcordí gave
me a flash of inspiration today how to explain that Rhodanu becomes Rhuodre
rather than **Rhuorn or **Rhuorre and
Rhodanense >
rhodray rather than **rhornay or
**rhorray, and so be able to keep the current name of the
Rhodrese language without introducing an exception or
inconsistencies or implausibilities in the historical
phonology.
(more…)
BXS (Benct’s X-SAMPA) is an extension and alteration of CXS
(Conlang X-SAMPA) which in turn is an extension of X-SAMPA.
While CXS is in spite of being defined by the de facto
usage of the members of the Conlang mailing list
mostly backwards-compatible with X-SAMPA, BXS is not
backwards-compatible with either, although differences (apart from
additions) from CXS are small, since I want fellew lit members to
be able to interpret BXS without too much trouble, should I happen
to use BXS rather than CXS on the list! :-) The premium in choosing
BXS notations is rather inner consistency and “making sense”
compared to the IPA/Unicode
characters they correspond to. Thus e.g. P is
ɸ rather than ʋ (which
is v\) although I need ʋ more
often that ɸ, because it restores analogy
between P B = ɸ β and
T D = θ ð which at least to
me is a better mnemonic; otherwise I ended up using p\
for ɸ and v\ for
ʋ and not using P at all just as
I’ve ended up not using F at all, instead preferring
m\ for ɱ. BXS also contains
notations for some nonstandard (some very nonstandard) phonetic
symbols, or for abbreviating some long CXS notations for sounds
which occur frequently like 8\ instead of
8_+_w (which I anyway simplify to
ɵ̟ in IPA because the full IPA
ɵ̟ʷ is too much of a mouthful IMHO)
or w\ and ψ for
β̞ which I use just because they look
good (you have to admit that ψ looks like a
cross between ʋ , ɸ and
w at least in some fonts! :-)
Since I’m very used to typing CXS and BXS it came naturally to
make a Vim keymap from BXS notations to their
correspoonding IPA/Unicode characters. Since differences between
BXS and CXS are small I hope other Vim users who are used to CXS
and X-SAMPA will find it useful. In addition to the BXS mappings
proper it contains some convenience mappings such as
<punctuation char>\ to get some literal
punctuation characters, and b\ g\ to get
ƀ and ǥ, which are
since before the IPA existed are used instead of
β and ɣ in Germanic philology.
The latter should not be seen as if I prefer
ƀ ǥ to β ɣ,
but only so that I want them available for situations where I need
them. BTW you can get ɡ as opposed to
g by typing g\\!
(more…)
Hjälp med översättning till engelska (med
rätt namn på menyval/etiketter/knappar mottages
tacksamt!
- Vänta med att ansluta skrivaren!
- I terminalen: (more…)
Mærik also uses active/passive participles
as agent/patient nouns but it uses zero
derivation, i.e. just uses the participle as a
noun without further ado. From the POW of Mærik
itself there is no ‘double meaning’; that
lekartan can or must sometimes be translated as
‘the one who is speaking’ and sometimes as ‘the
speaker’ is a complication of English grammar
which is simply absent in Mærik grammar. (more…)
In the shower one day I had a flash of inspiration
and finally knew how Kijeb tense-aspect-mood
marking should be organized. I’ll try to manage
to describe it without access to my dictionary.
Many aspects (sic!) of the following wholly or
partly obsoletize things said on the Kijeb page
on FrathWiki.
(more…)
On Conlang Herrig Thaillí (Henrik Theilling) wrote in response to me:
I’m ATM in woes WRT the Rhodrese indefinite article. I feel that the changes I’ve made to the feminine indefinite and plural definite forms call for a change in the plural indefinite as well. Consider the following patterns:
|
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
| def.
| el |
el |
la |
l’ |
li |
gl’ |
| indef.
| un |
un |
na |
n’ |
eun |
eun |
OR
|
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
_#C |
_#V |
| def.
| el |
el |
la |
l’ |
li |
gl’ |
| indef.
| un |
un |
na |
n’ |
ni |
gn’ |
Is the latter preferable or am I over-regularizing?
NB eun would still mean ‘some, a few’, while aocú means ‘some, any’ and naocú means ‘not any, none’.
My gut feeling for Rhodese is that the first alternative is more like it. It has that nice vowel change. And the system should not be made too regular I think.
(more…)
The first Dieophí of Burgundy moved with the whole of his
Vienese court and bureaucracy to Deujó and most notably
brought along all his notaries and scribes, who continued to
write in Vienay, and even took in new apprentices from the Vienay
area or trained apprentices from Burgundy and Lojunay to write in
the Vienay dialect. Thus the language of the royal chancery
became Vienay with a strong Burgundian and in particular Lojunay
admixture. Each new Dieophí before his father’s death served
as count of Vienay and brought with him a fresh batch of Vienay
scribes, secretaries and notaries at his ascension as duke of
Burgundy. The move of the court to Lojú under the reign of
the nth Dieophí — motivated by a desire
to keep a close check on the powerful patriarch of Lojú —
could only strengthen the use of this hybrid Vienay, because the
Lojunay dialect was closer to the Vienay dialect than the
dialects of Burgundy proper. Inevitably however the misnomer
Borgonzay ‘Burgundian’ became attached to this princely
chancery language especially after the nth
Dieophí decreed that all courts, and parliaments throughout
his domain, and the university of Deujó must use the
language of the princely chancery. The patriarchal and episcopal
chanceries soon had to follow suit as well.
