It's all Vüri's fault...

[Dréu Gavárþic'h]

I have been brought around.

It is my opinion that only three things should be eliminated:
1. The î
2. The accents in words like "és" and "más"
3. The ë at the end of irregular verbs

Thoughts?
Dréu

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jun 22, 2008 13:08:33 GMT -6 Dréu Gavárþic'h said:

I have been brought around.

It is my opinion that only three things should be eliminated:
1. The î
2. The accents in words like "és" and "más"
3. The ë at the end of irregular verbs

Thoughts?
Dréu

The thoughts of others on these points, and on the points you apparently do not support, were stated at length in other threads in this forum. Since you don't state the reasons for your opinions, it's difficult to know what old thoughts to bring up again, or what new thoughts might be inspired by your reasons.

[Dréu Gavárþic'h]

I think that things like gñh are clearly Talossan! We need those things. So what if the ô has a circumflex? It's really not that hard to remember. In short: It's Talossan, it's fun, why not?

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jun 23, 2008 8:19:40 GMT -6 Dréu Gavárþic'h said:

I think that things like gñh are clearly Talossan! We need those things. So what if the ô has a circumflex? It's really not that hard to remember. In short: It's Talossan, it's fun, why not?

Then why get rid of the accents on és and más?

[Dréu Gavárþic'h]

Jun 23, 2008 8:22:05 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Jun 23, 2008 8:19:40 GMT -6 Dréu Gavárþic'h said:

I think that things like gñh are clearly Talossan! We need those things. So what if the ô has a circumflex? It's really not that hard to remember. In short: It's Talossan, it's fun, why not?

Then why get rid of the accents on és and más?

Because they serve no purpose whatsoever.

gñh is a sound
â is a sound

the accents on és and más are just there... they don't do anything.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jun 23, 2008 8:33:56 GMT -6 Dréu Gavárþic'h said:

Jun 23, 2008 8:22:05 GMT -6 Sir C. M. Siervicül said:

Then why get rid of the accents on és and más?

Because they serve no purpose whatsoever.

gñh is a sound
â is a sound

the accents on és and más are just there... they don't do anything.

But:

1. Under the old orthography, gñh and nh represented the same sound. So by the same argument the additional complexity of gñh doesn't "do anything."

2. Maybe â is a sound, but is it really an independent sound? The argument has been made that's nothing but the regular sound of a in unstressed final position. I think that argument is a strong one.

3. Before you mentioned keeping ô. Under the old orthography, ô is a stressmarked o, and often appears when a stressmark is unnecessary. One of the major purposes of the Great Vowel & Stress Proposal (GV&SP) was to remove unnecessary stressmarks. So I guess we need to clarify what you mean by words "like" és and más. And how that would differ from GV&SP's implementation of a default stress rule to define when stressmarks are necessary.

[EM Vürinalt]

I like how this is my fault, when, I honestly had little to do with this beside a minor discussion about the Arestada with Dreu.

Anyways, like glh I think gñh was a very Talossan letter combination. I don't think any of us are trying to implement a change for glh to something less complex- it's uniquely Talossan.

 is a sound and by eliminating the circumflex we've eliminated a possible letter choice for adding new vocabulary to the language. Although I recognise that this letter is often unneeded at the end of a word when a simple à will do the trick, I think this letter could actually be implemented in new translations if that particular sound is needed.

I agree with Cresti that the GV&SP attempted to remove unnecessary stress. I think that stressmark in one syllable and one vowel words is irrelevent since that vowel must be stressed. That is one of the changes I do agree with the Arestada with.

For me, I'm kind of on a middle path between the changes of the Arestada and pre-Arestadâ Talossan. I love how pre-Arestadâ Talossan looks- it looks stunning, unique, and has a quality of quirkiness and beauty in it not found in other languages. I believe the Arestada changed the look of the language dramatically...something more "anglicised" without as many diacriticals and special characters. We lost something that made us unique.

Similarly, I'd also like to say current movements to remove eth and thorn from the langauge also are slightly disappointing. Borrowing on the words of Tomás Garçiér, "currently eth and thorn are the standard letter- instead of trying to remove them entirely, simply make the alternate orthography standard and shared between the two, ultimately avoiding "tg" and "th" as the letter's respective replacements." I understand the current arguement to remove eth and replace the remaining cases with "d" but it again removes a facet of the language that is distinctly creative and distinctly Talossan.

Again, we can draw on natural languages for this phenomenon. In russian the word "Что" (what) is written as it would be pronouned "chto." However, in spoken Russian, this word is pronounded "shto." A different letter representing a sound found in another letter. Perhaps this is the alternative to removing yet another distinct letter from our language.

Isn't this how we came to pronounce "-eux" and "-rh" as "sh." The letters are not phonetic at all, yet we mentaly assign different values on them despite their orthography.

Instead of attempting to remove the distinctive characters that make up Talossan, perhaps we could simply make it known that the remaining eths in the language are to be pronounced as a "d," without actually removing them.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jun 23, 2008 19:21:13 GMT -6 EM Vürinalt said:

 is a sound and by eliminating the circumflex we've eliminated a possible letter choice for adding new vocabulary to the language. Although I recognise that this letter is often unneeded at the end of a word when a simple à will do the trick, I think this letter could actually be implemented in new translations if that particular sound is needed.

"Sound" is a little too imprecise. I don't see any evidence that â represents an independent phoneme in Talossan. Every indication is that it's an allophone of a -- that is, the way a is regularly pronounced when it appears in certain environments.

By comparison, German ch can make two different sounds or allophones (ich-Laut versus ach-Laut) but both sounds are represented by the same letter because they represent the same phoneme. English t can make a number of different sounds (for example, the aspirated t in tore versus the non-aspirated t in store) but they're all represented by one letter because they're regular variations (again, allophones) of the same phoneme.

In short, a phoneme is a sound that is meaningful in a language (changing it can make a difference in meaning), while an allophone is a variant pronunciation of a phoneme that doesn't make a difference in meaning, it's just determined by the context that the phoneme appears in. Every indication is that â is not phonemic in Talossan as it exists now. Unless there's something we've missed, in which case I hope someone points it out.

Jun 23, 2008 19:21:13 GMT -6 EM Vürinalt said:

I agree with Cresti that the GV&SP attempted to remove unnecessary stress. I think that stressmark in one syllable and one vowel words is irrelevent since that vowel must be stressed. That is one of the changes I do agree with the Arestada with.

Of course, there are a few cases where an accent distinguishes words that would otherwise be spelled the same. Like à the preposition (at, in, to) versus a the pronoun (she). But the Arestada still allows for that.

Jun 23, 2008 19:21:13 GMT -6 EM Vürinalt said:

Similarly, I'd also like to say current movements to remove eth and thorn from the langauge also are slightly disappointing.

I'm not aware of anyone trying to do anything to thorn, at least.

[Hooligan]

I would like to state for the record that I, too, initially, considered â to be a different "sound" and would have granted it (as the creator of our language initially did) a specific letter. I have since become very educated by people who know languages; people who know the difference between a phoneme and an allophome (words I was only vaguely aware of before coming to a serious study of Talossan). I am here, as a convert, to say that Talossan is seriously studied by extremely talented minds before any proposal is made, and that our language is being tended by extremely talented and knowledgeable linguists, to whom I can only claim to be proud to trying to catch up. Talossan is a true language of the world, as legitimate as any non-conlang out there, and its short history, giving it such a deep character, says that it deserves to be treated as such. I am here to tell you that this is exactly how it is being treated by those who think long and hard about it.

Hooligan

[Üc R. Tärfâ]

Jun 24, 2008 22:07:46 GMT -6 Hooligan said:

I would like to state for the record that I, too, initially, considered â to be a different "sound" and would have granted it (as the creator of our language initially did) a specific letter. I have since become very educated by people who know languages; people who know the difference between a phoneme and an allophome (words I was only vaguely aware of before coming to a serious study of Talossan).

Mmm, because it's an allophone, it doesn't mean that it cannot have a specific sign.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jun 25, 2008 13:47:04 GMT -6 Üc R. Tärfâ said:

Mmm, because it's an allophone, it doesn't mean that it cannot have a specific sign.

True. But a phonemic orthography is often viewed as a good thing, and it's best when deviations from phonemics serve some constructive purpose, like preserving etymological or morphological information. Deviations from phonemics can be counterproductive when they don't serve some constructive purpose, and actually get in the way of another valuable objective, like being able to accurately represent word stress (which is a real practical problem in Talossan).

[Üc R. Tärfâ]

But in this case it isn't strictly a deviation from a phonemic orotgraphy...

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jun 26, 2008 4:37:14 GMT -6 Üc R. Tärfâ said:

But in this case it isn't strictly a deviation from a phonemic orotgraphy...

I'm curious. In your view, how is it not?

[Üc R. Tärfâ]

Because we can consider the ortographic accent on "à" as a "modification" of the "a" to underline the fact that is an allophone of "a". For exemple in italian we have "pesca" that means both "peach" and "fishing", however in correct written italian the first should be written "pèsca" while fishing is "pésca" to underline the different openess of the vowel (because in spoken italian it's not possible to confound them as one has on open-e and the other a close-e... honestly I've difficulty to differentiate them because in Ligurian exists only the close e ).

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

Jul 12, 2008 5:08:02 GMT -6 Üc R. Tärfâ said:

For exemple in italian we have "pesca" that means both "peach" and "fishing", however in correct written italian the first should be written "pèsca" while fishing is "pésca" to underline the different openess of the vowel (because in spoken italian it's not possible to confound them as one has on open-e and the other a close-e... honestly I've difficulty to differentiate them because in Ligurian exists only the close e ).

It sounds to me like that's marking a phonemic difference, as open-e and close-e are different phonemes in at least some dialects of Italian. Pésca and pèsca are therefore a minimal pair (two different words that are distinguished only by the the change of a single phoneme, like English bat and bet).