Questions about the 2007 Arestadâ

[Continuing my response to Hool's post with the bullet points]


I came up with the idea that regular stress ought to be reanalysed as falling on the vowel before the last consonant(s), rather than as falling on the penult, years ago. I don't know if you got this from me or not — it seemed pretty obvious to me, so I won't take the credit if you figured it out for yourselves! Anyway, we agree on this. It's your written accent system I don't like.


I cannot recall Ben ever hoping or trying to get rid of î. He raised a question about whether /ɨ/ could be considered an allophone of /i/ next to nasals, since you find a mixture of words with the sequence în/îm and in/im in the dictionary, but /ɨ/ also occurs in other environments as well, e.g. îrt "art", so there is no question in my mind that it is a phoneme in Talossan, and I always pronounce it where it is spelled. I wouldn't have a problem with allowing /i/ as a variant pronunciation of /ɨ/ before nasals, at least in pretonic position (i.e. before the stressed syllable). Post-tonically (after the stressed syllable) I'm not so sure — here it occurs mostly in the adverb ending -mînt, and pronouncing that as /mint/ feels quite odd to me. I could accept the pronunciation /mənt/, though.


This doesn't bother me, but I don't really see the point, since it's only two words. I think the newspaper Støtanneu should always be spelt with ø not ö, but I have no objection to spelling stötanneu and lögneu when otherwise using the words, though my inclination would be to leave them alone and create new Latin-derived synonyms for "lie" and "tusk".


I am not sure about the allophones. Of the letter a, the 1993 dictionary says that when unstressed it tends towards [ë] (i.e. /ə/), but often retains its full pronunciation [a]; the 1997 dictionary says that it is always pronounced [a], period, and that â is pronounced [ë], thus effectively stating that they are two separate phonemes. Meanwhile, in the 1996 grammar, the 3s verb ending is transcribed as [ë] (leva ['levë], electeva [êlêc'tevë], etc.); on the other hand, one of the specific corrections I have marked in my copy is ¿Pensa-t-o që schi? "Does he think so?", where the book has ['pênsëtu], but I have a written correction from Ben Madison that it should be ['pênsatu]. There may be a pre-tonic/post-tonic thing at work here, i.e. pre-tonic unstressed a=/a/ and post-tonic unstressed a=/ə/, which seems to me generally to fit, but the pensa-t-o thing goes against that idea.

Regarding the letter â, it serves a grammatical function as well: to mark feminine nouns and adjectives (except for the name Talossa itself, nouns ending in unstressed -a, rare though they may be, are masculine, while those ending in -â are feminine). In addition, the feminine -â ending has had some sort of written accent since 1981 — before it was â, it was ă, and went through an early phase as ą as well. The point is, writing the feminine ending with no accent mark goes against almost the entirety of written Talossan tradition.

As for e, again the evidence is unclear. Both the 1993 dictionary and the 1997 dictionary very clearly give only [e] and [ê] (i.e. /ɛ/) as possible pronunciations for e; [ë] is never mentioned as an option. However, in the 1996 grammar, the plural ending -en is transcribed [ën], the third person plural verb ending -ent is transcribed as [ënt], and the adjective qualsevol, quáisevois is transcribed as ['kwawsëvo], ['kwajsëvojs]. On the other hand, dove is transcribed as ['dove], and ciovec as ['Covêk].



I went through the 1997 dictionary today and did a search for the letter å and found well over a hundred. Granted some were multiple instances of e.g. på and så, but still the number is more like 80+ than 8. In addition, many of the words I found which contain å are words derived from African Latin — the very thing we're supposed to be cultivating and encouraging. Even though I don't really care for having a phonemic distinction between /o/ and /ɔ/ (and I suspect it might actually be something like /ɔ/ vs. /ɑ/~/ɒ/, I'm not really sure) I would strongly discourage abolishing å for this reason alone.

[/li][li]The ability to indicate stress on the vowels ä, ö, and ü (which cannot be done in Classic Orthography) was provided.[/quote]
This is true, but it's an issue which I thought about a lot over the years, and I could come up with no way to do it that didn't disrupt the traditional look of Talossan too much (which your solution does). I'd rather live with the ambiguity here, and indicate irregularly stressed ä, å, î, ö, ü where necessary in a phonemic transcription in textbooks and dictionaries. However, I would be interested in any data or lists you have on words written with â, ô, û in your system.

[/li][li]A stress rule was adopted. As we all know, even Ben commented often on the fact that Talossan was overburdened with accent marks[/b][/quote]
He did? I don't remember him ever using words like "overburdened". His dictionaries say things like "Talossan has a full complement of diacritical marks, more than any other European language". Though we did talk on occasion about possible ways to make the use of written accents more consistent, the intent was always to regularize and make more predictable, never to remove as many as possible. All the accents are part and parcel of Talossan's delightful spicy deliciousness. I'm confident Ben would agree with me there.

There are also certain word endings which are so characteristic of Talossan that I would keep written accents on them for the sake of preserving written tradition. For example, the spelling Talossán goes back to 1981 and I couldn't imagine spelling it without the acute accent. The short list of such endings that I can think of immediately would be -â, -ál, -án, -éir, -oûr, -escù. I would treat those as indivisible units, permanently bearing an accent mark despite one not being required when we reanalyse regular stress as falling on the vowel before the last consonant.


I believe the pronunciation of most words — or at least a large majority — is predictable from the spelling even in what you call Classic Orthography. Doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement — I think there is, and I've started thinking seriously again about reforms that I would make since we started having these discussions — but I don't think it's anywhere near as chaotic and unruly as you are making it out to be.


"Unrealistic" or not, it is Talossan. It's been written that way since 1981, and there's absolutely no good reason to change it. It's not hard to remember that -escù is pronounced ['êsku] — one single exception to the rule that final ù is stressed, with the weight of the entire literary history of the Talossan language from 1981 to 2007 behind it.

[/li][li]The regularisation of the way each vowel is marked for stress was done, so that it is not the case that while á is the stressmarked version of a, it is ô, not ó (which isn't even found in Classic Orthography), that is the stressmarked version of o).[/li][/ul][/quote]
While your system is simple, it is too drastic a change from the traditional look of Talossan. It would be far preferable to have a few more rules, but still regular, in order to keep the look of the language more intact. For example, I would keep ô for irregularly stressed o, and for i I would do something like í before consonants, ï before vowels and ì when word-final. It doesn't matter that different vowels might take different diacritics to show irregular stress; as long as those particular accented letters are not used for any other purpose, the system remains completely regular and predictable.

That's all I have time for tonight. More to follow tomorrow or Saturday, when I have time.

I'm indexing a book on the Alevis in Turkey today and I'm having to use lots of S-cedillas and dotless I's.

But yes, I think there's something to your idea that the membership of the CÚG in 2007 was made up of people who hadn't been around for long enough to, er, bellyfeel Talossan. (I hate having to use Newspeak, but sometimes Orwell had the right idea.)

It's the only explanation I can come up with for some of the stuff in the 2007 Arestadâ. And I don't say so to be mean, for I think the guys I've gotten to know, like Hool and Cresti, are genuinely decent, kind people. I don't doubt their good intentions in 2007, either, and in some areas, such as reanalysing where regular word stress falls in Talossan, I think they were spot on. But I also genuinely believe that people who could bellyfeel Talossan, as you say, would not have voted for a number of the other things that were voted for.


What things, exactly?

Languages complicate themselves as well, you know.

But what I'm getting from your answer is that the 2007 CÚG based its reform on what they saw from the people who only ever use Talossan for short interjections, what the Irish call the cupla focal crowd. For an endangered minority language like ours, is it worth alienating the existing active and quasi-fluent speaker base (people like Tomás and myself) to make it easier for people who don't actually know the language?

Another way to put that was that the time to make those reforms was before anyone actually used Talossan apart from its creator, and it's too late now.

Well, I hope everyone knows that we certainly never meant to alienate anyone. We were also actively using Talossan, and for a lot more than just "azul", so we didn't want to alienate ourselves either LOL. We were recognising trends in the spelling of Talossan in a community of real active lovers and users of the language that was freed from Benslaps, and we wrote about them. I think the very fact that we (all of us) always remained one linguistic community, able to read each other's Talossan writings, and now are able to have this very discussion, means that the community is as strong as ever.

I am very intrigued by Tomás's comments that the stress rule adopted is "spot on", leading me to wonder if some adaptation of it might be something adopted by the communiy of Ladintschen who use Classic Orthography, perhaps one of a series of changes Tomás indicates might be good "tweaks" that the CUG would find itself recognising as, say, "Classic Orthography Reformed". EDIT: I see in Tomás's latest post that he proposed just such a thing, and certainly, Tomás, the CUG would recognise such a development in an Arestada. The CUG doesn't tell people to stop using Classic Orthography, or to stop working with it. It only notices and describes what people are doing with the language. The CUG istelf has adopted a particular spelling system and set of practices that it currently uses for its documents, but the same could be said of every Arestada ever issued, going back to 1983. Unlike the CUG under Ben, though, today's CUG doesn't feel it its place to slap people down when their understanding of the language is not orthodox, but allows the language's users to use it freely.

The point is, Talossan is a living language. Its users are always going to play with it, experiment with it, simplify (or, as Miestrâ pointed out, sometimes complicate) it. And we're all going to keep having tons of fun doing it, just as I have had ever since 2005 when i began learning it and using it to write the operettas, grants of arms, charters of the CUG and the ATLO, correspondence, and, more than anything, to chat with other Ladintschen.

Hool

P.S. I see Tomás posted simultaneous with me. I will reply to his separately, but just wanted to quickly say that no offense was taken. It is just that as a conservative person by nature, I honestly had not realized that the only serious objection to the Arestada is based not on linguistics but aesthetics. The other thing i will say real quickly is that your comments on gñh have me a wondering more than a bit if I might find myself using gnh in my own writing (no tilde though, lol).

One quick follow up...


There are linguistic arguments as well — see where I wrote about î, and â and ë as allophones of a and e, for example.

But yes, a number of my objections are aesthetic. As Miestrâ put it, some of your reforms make Talossan look less Talossan — along the linez uv how sum speling reformz uv Inglish just luk stranje and silly too us, becuz they don't luk like reel Inglish. Of course, in English we don't use accents so I have to change more letters around to get the desired effect, but the feeling I get reading English written like that is similar to the feeling I get when reading post-2007 Talossan. It doesn't look right, it feels wrong — no matter how logical the changes might be or how much easier it might make learning the language — and that "wrong" feeling in the gut is, I suspect, largely due to having internalized a literary tradition. Cogneçarh in place of cogñheçar, for example, hits me as feeling wrong in the same way that "uv" in place of "of" or "pleez" in place of "please" does in English.


Well, that's a start! Writing gnh looks like you just forgot an accent, rather than spelling it completely wrong.

Before someone else points it out, I'll mention that you left out a meaningless accent over the u in Scúrzniâ. :-)

Hool