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[I haven't had anything but spam off this list for years!] Martín Baldán, On 06/05/2006 15:05:
--- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, And Rosta <arosta@...> wrote:It is easy to construct a self-segmenting engelang, but the real snag is how to cope with names (etc., e.g. borrowings) where one wants to minimize distortion of the original form of the name. I'd be interested to hear people's ideas on possible solutions. Oh -- and a further criterion: concision is a desideratum, so the question is: What's a good way to handle names in a self-segmentingengelang that constitutes an optimal balance between (a) preserving self-segmentation, (b) distorting the original name as little aspossible,and (c) concision.
[...]
I'm working on a logical language myself, but it's still less than half-baked, and quickly evolving. To be brief, I'd like it to have a lisp-like syntax, and I think I've thought of a minimally verbose way to express deeply nested parenthesis, by using three parenthethical symbols (words) instead of two, with a bottom-up hierarchical markup. I think that this avoids ever having to write/say two consecutive parenthetical symbols, and also lets you pick a parenthesised expression and build another one from it, without altering its inner hierarchical markup. I can elaborate if someone is interested.
Yes please. ("lisp-like syntax" means nothing to me, I might add; I know nowt about the syntax of LISP.)
One of the first concerns when designing my language has been how to enter and exit it, and how to quote foreign speech. Those are, IMHO, two different concepts. When you quote foreign speech, your language controls the situation, and it can mandate that the piece of foreign speech ends when a given keyword is found. On the other hand, while you can and should have a keyword to exit the language, it makes no sense to define a keyword to enter the language inside the same language. For instance, in Earth-Minimal,(as far as I remember) HEX is said to exit/enter the language. So, if I'm tired of it and want to forget about it and switch to English, I must say HEX.. but then, if say the word HEXagon, I'm speaking Earth-Minimal again! That's plain absurd: the conditions under which one begins to speak in a language must be defined outside the language.
I agree. IIRC, my conlang has a couple of ways of exiting foreign text (that are specified when entering it). The requirement is of course that the exit marker does not occur within the text itself. In one method, the exit marker contains a click phoneme. In the other method, a la Lojban, the exit marker is defined at the point of entry.
Now, to adress the topic of foreign names, I've taken an approach that is probably overkill, but at least lets you express *any* name (except extremely long _hundreds of syllables_ hypothetical names,in this version, but this can be easily fixed) without changing its internal structure in any way, and withot pausing either before or after pronouncing it:
[...] Like Jorge, I feel that this proposal does not score high with respect to the Concision desideratum... Your solution is pretty analogous to one of those my conlang uses for foreign text, but it strikes me as too cumbersome for ordinary names.I guess the solution will depend both on the phonology of your conlang and on its segmentation strategy.
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What do you think? Is there a simpler way to achieve the same generality?
In the current state of my language, Livagian, the shape of stems is restricted only in that (i) every syllable bears level tone, (ii) the stem cannot begin with /r/. So the process for Livagicizing a name is (a) throw away any tone (which has the additional virtue of sparing the speaker from having to work out how to map tone in the source language to tone in Livagian), (b) add an epenthetic /y/ before any initial /r/, (c) add a final (nonlevel-tone-bearing) inflection indicating that the stem comes from the onomasticon instead of the ordinary lexicon. This method applies only to single-word names. The method for dealing with a name like "Martín Baldán" is more complicated. In this instance it would be: MULTIWORD-NAME-INTRODUCING-PARTICLE-mærctinỳbældæn-INFLECTION --And.