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on 3/10/02 2:35 PM, Mike Wright at darwin@hidden.email wrote: > Rex May - Baloo wrote: >> >> Okay, we've got zoi for no-. > > Two syllables, then? Sorry. Zoy. Hard for me not to type oi. Rule is, if it could be confused with a diphthong it's prohibited. Or if I could confuse it, at any rate. That is, for me, zoi tends to sound like zoy anyway, but zio of course does not sound like zyo, because the i is stressed. So, > >> Now, I really don't like 'pu' for the 'that' >> which means remote from both go and zi, so how about tyaw, from Mandarin >> tiao2, which seems to mean remote or distant? > > It's uncommon enough that I had to look it up in a dictionary. How > about Hindustani <dur>, which already fits the phonology? Or, Malay > <jauh> as "jaw" or "jau"? (Too bad we can't use the Hokkien <hng> as > <hq>, though the Fuzhou cognate would give us <hwoq>, which could work.) I like jaw. The change has been made. > >> And, having searched and thought, I'm inclined to go with 'heni', from >> English 'any', because the nicest idea was 'gin,' but I want that for a >> badly needed single-syllable word for 'computer.' > > Why is "gin" particularly good for "computer"? Hindi 'gin' meaning to calculate, and English enGINe as a mnemonic. > > And why should such a complex machine be a morpheme, anyhow? Why not a > compound of some kind? A calque on the (Taiwanese) Mandarin > <dian4nao3> could be "dyenbrein", if we borrowed <dyen> for > "electrical". (But shouldn't <brein> be <breyn>?) Yes, should be breyn. Borrowing dyen for 'electrical' is a great idea. My thinking is that computers are at this point so universal as to call for a morpheme. Already I've generated: gin -- computer gagin -- mainframe computer taqgin ? hand computer jenugin ? laptop stolgin ? desktop computer gingepley ? computer game (maybe this should be ginpleyxo) > > I suspect that whoever ends up creating most of the Ceqli vocabulary > will have to become very adept at creating calques on existing > compound words from other languages. German and Mandarin are both > quite good at this, where English and Japanese tend to simply borrow > compounds intact, just adapting them to the native morphophonology. > Ceqli phonology is limiting enough that the English-Japanese approach > should be mostly limited to morphemes. At least, that seems like the > most productive approach to me. Right ho, and so is Loglan. Inclined to compound, I mean. So that's always worth looking at when scrambling for a compound. -- >PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: rmay@hidden.email > Rex F. May (Baloo) > Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp > Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/gdummy.htm > Language site at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm >Discuss my auxiliary language at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/txeqli/