Post by Sir C. M. Siervicül on Oct 18, 2007 16:34:40 GMT -6
My quoted comments and King John's answers are from the Word docs posted in the main GV&SP thread. References to page and paragraph numbers in my quoted comments refer to the original GV&SP doc, also linked from the main GV&SP thread.
REGARDING ACUTE V. GRAVE ACCENTS FOR STRESSMARKS
My original comments:
King John's answers:
I don't think that's less to learn or less to worry about, just less Talossan. No one would have to learn about or worry about anything other than the fact that acute and grave accents both mark stress, which is exactly the same thing they would have to learn under your proposal as it is. The rule I propose is much closer to traditional practice, and I think it's aesthetically pleasing as well (it provides a nice symmetry or balance to the accents, and "acute at the beginning, grave at the end" fits together nicely with the circumflex – which has the visual appearance of starting out as acute and finishing as grave – as the stressed version of the umlaut). This is also consistent with the origins of the accents in question. In the old polytonic Greek orthography, acute represented a high tone, grave represented a low tone, but only on the final syllable, and circumflex represented a rising then falling tone.
The standard distinction between the acute and grave accents in Romance languages is that the acute accent was used on close vowels and the grave accent was used on open vowels. Catalan, Occitan, and French generally preserve this distinction (although stress itself is not marked in French). Spanish came to use acute accents for everything, while the tendency in Italo-Romance is to use grave accents for everything (with the most common exception in Italo-Romance being close e). Rumantsch appears to follow the Italo-Romance rules (acute accents appear mostly in a few French borrowings with é).
Current practice in Talossan is that a, i, and u can take either acute or grave accents (determined according to the rule I propose preserving), e can take either acute or circumflex (according to whether it's open or close, like the traditional Romance rule), and o takes only the circumflex. An alternative suggestion: Instead of having grave and acute alternate according to word position, assign a single specific accent to each vowel according to traditional Romance practice (as nearly as possible). So i and u would always take acute accents, and a would always take a grave accent. The appropriate accent for e and o would depend on whether they are more commonly open or close vowels in Talossan. I would suggest acute for e, and could go either way for o. The choice of circumflex as the original stressmark for o hints that Talossan o is more open than Spanish o (Rumantsch has an open-mid o instead of a close-mid o), but the existence (until now) of å would suggest a more close realization of o.
As a last resort, if no one else likes the idea of mixed stressmarks (come on!), I would encourage the use of the grave accent instead of the acute accent as the default in instructional materials (if we are to use a default, as your draft does). The universal use of acute accents appears to me to be an Ibero-Romance idiosyncrasy. Not only does it diverge from traditional Talossan practice, it diverges from all of the languages (Rumantsch, Sardinian, Sicilian, Occitan) to which Talossan is supposed to be most closely related.
I wouldn't particularly mind making tú regular as tù. The reason I cited it as an exception is that u takes the grave accent in word final position by default already, so tú is an exception to the existing rule.
REGARDING THE LETTER J
My original comments:
King John's answers:
To the contrary, giving j a clear niche explains why it still exists. As far as I can tell, in all other Romance languages, j either specialised or disappeared. All the evidence is that j also specialised in Talossan. There is no evidence to suggest that j and i are entirely equivalent in Talossan, unlike every other modern Romance language.
You proposed recognising j "as a full-blooded Talossan letter" way back in your original "Modest Proposals" on Witt, on the basis that "J is actually fairly common in Talossan." Lord Hooligan backed down from his original idea that j should be eliminated from Talossan, with the following words:
As Lord Hooligan observed, the reason j is "fairly common in Talossan" is the cj combination. If you respell cj as chi, j is less common than k, and just as common as w and y. If j is to serve no purpose at all, I would favour giving it the same treatment as y. But I still believe, as Lord Hooligan said, that "it's a Talossan letter."
REGARDING A-BREVE AS AN OPTIONAL REPLACEMENT FOR FINAL A-CIRCUMFLEX
My original comments:
King John's answers:
Talossan doesn't. Talossan orthography is all about prettying up (for certain odd values of "pretty"). But since we're changing a lot of that now, if we are to avoid optional variations for aesthetic effect, why a purely decorative j? Still, I suppose this isn't the kind of thing that has to be spelled out in an Arestadâ.
REGARDING DISAMBIGUATION OF MONOSYLLABLES
My original comments:
King John's answers:
There are a lot of things languages do that aren't strictly necessary. So Talossan has features it doesn't need to have. But I think a good rule of thumb is that if Talossan shares a particular feature with all other major Romance languages, there's no need to remove it from Talossan, either. See my next response. I do not propose adding accents to any monosyllables that don't already have them. I just want to preserve the (traditional, reasonable, and highly Romance) disambiguation that already exists in the language.
My original comments:
King John's answers:
There will always be some homophones that are indistinguishable in writing, but disambiguation via accents is well-established in Talossan and is also used in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Rumantsch, and French. I'm sure there are others. If that's needless effort, the world's major Romance languages have not caught on yet. But again, my priority is preserving the disambiguated pairs that already exist. If fà, pál, pù, and tôn lose their accents for all senses, I can live with that.
REGARDING ACUTE V. GRAVE ACCENTS FOR STRESSMARKS
My original comments:
In the table of monophthongs, I oppose the "anything goes" approach to the acute and grave accents. We should preserve the traditional rule that grave accents are used on final vowels (including single-letter words), and acute accents are used everywhere else. This should at least be the default rule (I have no problem saying it's acceptable to do otherwise), and should be followed in the examples given in the CÚG's reference materials. For example, at the top of page 7, á should be à and lá should be là, and the last word in the document should be solo'istà rather than solo'istá. One exception to this rule is the word tú, which always has an acute accent.
King John's answers:
I'd rather leave it that acute and grave accents are exactly equivalent in all instances. Less to learn, less to worry about.
I don't think that's less to learn or less to worry about, just less Talossan. No one would have to learn about or worry about anything other than the fact that acute and grave accents both mark stress, which is exactly the same thing they would have to learn under your proposal as it is. The rule I propose is much closer to traditional practice, and I think it's aesthetically pleasing as well (it provides a nice symmetry or balance to the accents, and "acute at the beginning, grave at the end" fits together nicely with the circumflex – which has the visual appearance of starting out as acute and finishing as grave – as the stressed version of the umlaut). This is also consistent with the origins of the accents in question. In the old polytonic Greek orthography, acute represented a high tone, grave represented a low tone, but only on the final syllable, and circumflex represented a rising then falling tone.
The standard distinction between the acute and grave accents in Romance languages is that the acute accent was used on close vowels and the grave accent was used on open vowels. Catalan, Occitan, and French generally preserve this distinction (although stress itself is not marked in French). Spanish came to use acute accents for everything, while the tendency in Italo-Romance is to use grave accents for everything (with the most common exception in Italo-Romance being close e). Rumantsch appears to follow the Italo-Romance rules (acute accents appear mostly in a few French borrowings with é).
Current practice in Talossan is that a, i, and u can take either acute or grave accents (determined according to the rule I propose preserving), e can take either acute or circumflex (according to whether it's open or close, like the traditional Romance rule), and o takes only the circumflex. An alternative suggestion: Instead of having grave and acute alternate according to word position, assign a single specific accent to each vowel according to traditional Romance practice (as nearly as possible). So i and u would always take acute accents, and a would always take a grave accent. The appropriate accent for e and o would depend on whether they are more commonly open or close vowels in Talossan. I would suggest acute for e, and could go either way for o. The choice of circumflex as the original stressmark for o hints that Talossan o is more open than Spanish o (Rumantsch has an open-mid o instead of a close-mid o), but the existence (until now) of å would suggest a more close realization of o.
As a last resort, if no one else likes the idea of mixed stressmarks (come on!), I would encourage the use of the grave accent instead of the acute accent as the default in instructional materials (if we are to use a default, as your draft does). The universal use of acute accents appears to me to be an Ibero-Romance idiosyncrasy. Not only does it diverge from traditional Talossan practice, it diverges from all of the languages (Rumantsch, Sardinian, Sicilian, Occitan) to which Talossan is supposed to be most closely related.
Why would tú be an exception?
I wouldn't particularly mind making tú regular as tù. The reason I cited it as an exception is that u takes the grave accent in word final position by default already, so tú is an exception to the existing rule.
REGARDING THE LETTER J
My original comments:
In the diphthongs table, the section on iv talks about i and j being interchangeable in these diphthongs. I think that's going a bit too far, as it requires respelling a great majority of the Talossan words with j, because the great majority have j in the combination cj (or scj). Thus point 8 of the "how to get there from here" section requires respelling all words with cj. I would much prefer to simply specify that a c is always hard next to j. In fact, cjv so greatly outnumbers chiv that I would much rather change all occurrences of chiv (9) to cjv (146) than the reverse. Then chi would basically only be necessary to make c hard when followed by i as a monophthong. Consider this, also: If we respell all the cj words, that only leaves about 40 words with j. And about half of those are liable to be respelled under Proposal 2 (foreign imports) or to be supplanted by a more Romance word (why smiðjâ for "blacksmith's shop" when we have furxhéir?). Did we "save" j through Proposal 3.11 only to get rid of 90% of its occurrences anyways? Keeping cj gives j a clear niche.
King John's answers:
I disagree. J and I should be entirely equivalent. That's an EASY rule to remember. To have them equivalent except when after c and before a vowel isn't easy. Providing j with a "clear niche" is to complicate things unnecessarily – or rather, to fail to simplify.
To the contrary, giving j a clear niche explains why it still exists. As far as I can tell, in all other Romance languages, j either specialised or disappeared. All the evidence is that j also specialised in Talossan. There is no evidence to suggest that j and i are entirely equivalent in Talossan, unlike every other modern Romance language.
You proposed recognising j "as a full-blooded Talossan letter" way back in your original "Modest Proposals" on Witt, on the basis that "J is actually fairly common in Talossan." Lord Hooligan backed down from his original idea that j should be eliminated from Talossan, with the following words:
mha said:
We can't name people "Del Cjar" and "Cjara" and claim that "J" is a foreign letter. The number of truly varied Talossan words that contain a "J" (especially in the construction "CJ") is well over a hundred. It's a Talossan letter.As Lord Hooligan observed, the reason j is "fairly common in Talossan" is the cj combination. If you respell cj as chi, j is less common than k, and just as common as w and y. If j is to serve no purpose at all, I would favour giving it the same treatment as y. But I still believe, as Lord Hooligan said, that "it's a Talossan letter."
REGARDING A-BREVE AS AN OPTIONAL REPLACEMENT FOR FINAL A-CIRCUMFLEX
My original comments:
Number 1 says "Replace all instances of â and å with a." At one point I was going to propose keeping the final â on an optional basis, it being such an ubiquitous feature of Talossan. But that would create a potential for confusion with the stress-marked form of ä. Still, I think it would be nice to say something like: "In the past, final unstressed a in feminine words was often marked with a breve (ǎ). This is still occasionally seen in flowery or pedantic writing." A-breve came before a-circumflex, and was replaced only because ǎ is harder to generate on a computer. This would create the tiniest opening for those who still want to pretty up their writing with gratuitous diacritics to do so, without causing confusion or making anyone feel in the slightest way obligated to do so.
King John's answers:
I deprecate prettying up.
Talossan doesn't. Talossan orthography is all about prettying up (for certain odd values of "pretty"). But since we're changing a lot of that now, if we are to avoid optional variations for aesthetic effect, why a purely decorative j? Still, I suppose this isn't the kind of thing that has to be spelled out in an Arestadâ.
REGARDING DISAMBIGUATION OF MONOSYLLABLES
My original comments:
I also recommend changing së to sè to distinguish it from the word se that already exists, following the precedent of words such as à, là, and tù. I would also change sâ to sà to distinguish from så (which will become sa), or vice-versa.
King John's answers:
I've been thinking a lot about this in recent weeks, and I really don't think we need to distinguish AT ALL in writing between these homophonic word-pairs. I'd (in fact) be in favour of knocking the accent off à, là, and tù, before I'd want to start splattering accents around other words that don't need them.
There are a lot of things languages do that aren't strictly necessary. So Talossan has features it doesn't need to have. But I think a good rule of thumb is that if Talossan shares a particular feature with all other major Romance languages, there's no need to remove it from Talossan, either. See my next response. I do not propose adding accents to any monosyllables that don't already have them. I just want to preserve the (traditional, reasonable, and highly Romance) disambiguation that already exists in the language.
My original comments:
This also relates to number 15, which calls for going through the lexicon and removing "unnecessary stressmarks." Like the original set of "modest proposals" said, "even though there's no need to mark the stress on a one-syllable word, a stress mark is still used on some one-syllable words to avoid confusion with other words pronounced and otherwise spelled the same." The current GV&SP draft is less clear on this issue. I would say that a stressmark is not "unnecessary" when it disambiguates two homophones. I don't propose going through the lexicon to add accents to existing monosyllabic homophones, but in the case of se/së and så/sâ at least one of the pair is already accented – we'd just be switching the accent to one that makes more sense.
Also, I would be conservative about removing stressmarks from monosyllabic words even if those words do not presently have a non-stressmarked counterpart. First, such words are often very basic and very recognizable, and in many cases the stressmarks should probably be retained on historical grounds (especially since they are incapable of causing any confusion anyways). Second, a non-stressmarked homophone may be created in the future, automatically creating a la/là relationship between the old word and the new word. Third, some of these monosyllables are homophones already, and instead of removing the accent completely, we could remove the accent from one sense and leave it on the other, thereby disambiguating the homophones in writing. Examples include tú (subject pronoun, possessive pronoun, and possessive adjective – which could be disambiguated just like in Spanish), fà (musical note, griddle), pù (digging stick, pine nut), pál (gunshot, pawl), and tôn>tón (see paragraph 21 below – musical accent, tone, English ton)
Also, I would be conservative about removing stressmarks from monosyllabic words even if those words do not presently have a non-stressmarked counterpart. First, such words are often very basic and very recognizable, and in many cases the stressmarks should probably be retained on historical grounds (especially since they are incapable of causing any confusion anyways). Second, a non-stressmarked homophone may be created in the future, automatically creating a la/là relationship between the old word and the new word. Third, some of these monosyllables are homophones already, and instead of removing the accent completely, we could remove the accent from one sense and leave it on the other, thereby disambiguating the homophones in writing. Examples include tú (subject pronoun, possessive pronoun, and possessive adjective – which could be disambiguated just like in Spanish), fà (musical note, griddle), pù (digging stick, pine nut), pál (gunshot, pawl), and tôn>tón (see paragraph 21 below – musical accent, tone, English ton)
King John's answers:
Spanish, and every other language I can think of, has lots of pairs of words undistinguished in spelling. Why make the Talossan student memorise WHICH noun – the digging stick or the pine nut – has an accent mark? Needless effort.
There will always be some homophones that are indistinguishable in writing, but disambiguation via accents is well-established in Talossan and is also used in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Rumantsch, and French. I'm sure there are others. If that's needless effort, the world's major Romance languages have not caught on yet. But again, my priority is preserving the disambiguated pairs that already exist. If fà, pál, pù, and tôn lose their accents for all senses, I can live with that.
