Lecture 2 Assignments

[Hooligan]

Students --

Since I am late in posting the assignments for this week, and in keeping with my promise that you will always have at least a week to do your assignments, these assignments will not be due until the 23rd of September.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR LECTURE 2

LECTURE PART 1 ASSIGNMENT:

1. How many vowel letters does Talossan have? What are they? How are each of them marked to indicate stress?

2. Name three vowel letters that exist in "Old Spelling" but are no longer seen in "New Spelling".

3. When does the letter a become pronounced as a schwa ("uh")?

NOTE: In addition to your answer, there is one other situation (not mentioned in the lecture) in which the letter a is sounded as a schwa, and that is when a word fitting the description you gave in your answer is pluralized (by the addition of an -s). We will discuss pluralization in more detail later in the course.

4. Transliterate the following words into Talossan (that is, re-spell each word using Talossan vowels so that it sounds the same when spoken in Talossan as it does in English:

a. roam
b. ream
c. room
d. ram

5. Many vowels in English modify or degenerate in ways that do not happen in Talossan. This makes transliteration of some English words into Talossan inexact. Knowing that your answers will not be exact, transliterate the following words, and say them aloud with the Talossan spelling you came up with:

a. rum
b. first
c. stare
d. fist
e. look

LECTURE PART 2 ASSIGNMENT:

1. Name the two letters that are considered to be vowels in Talossan, but consonants in English. These letters only appear in vowel combinations. Which other letter does each of the two represent? Which of these letters is often found after the letter c, and why?

2. Which doubled-vowel in Talossan (that is, a vowel repeated right after itself) is pronounced in two syllables? How are all other doubled-vowels pronounced?

3. Transliterate the following words into Talossan, using polyphthongs (combinations of two or more vowels) - note that some words may not exactly transliterate in every respect:

a. rain
b. town
c. coy
d. used
e. yes
f. yowl
g. twin
h. guide
i. loud

4. What is the Talossan vowel-pair that is not a diphthong, but which is instead pronounced exactly like the Talossan vowel u? Use this vowel-pair to transliterate the English words fool and rule.

5. Some English words (such as "ruin") cannot be transliterated into Talossan without somehow marking that the vowels that would otherwise combine to form a Talossan diphthong should be pronounced separately, in different syllables. (We have seen one such way in the lecture -- marking one of the two vowels as being stressed -- when discussing the difference between eu and éu.) We will discuss this topic further a bit later in the course, but for now list three English words for which such a marking would be necessary, if they were transliterated into Talossan.

VOCABULARY ASSIGNMENT:

Read the sets of words turned in by all students in the Week 1 Vocabulary thread.

Although you may not know the proper pronunciation of the consonants yet (and you also may be putting stress on the improper syllable in words that have no stressmark), practice saying the words to the best of your ability, concentrating on getting the vowel sounds correct.

Learn to count in Talossan. As mentioned on the vocabulary thread, some of the numbers are among the small number of irregularly-pronounced words. Learn these as you learn to count in Talossan:

• qátor (= four) - pronounce the q just like the English (or Talossan) k.
  
• simca (= five) - pronounce the i like the Talossan ü
  
• séifet (= seven) - pronounce the ei diphthong as if it were the ai diphthong. That is, instead of the sound from the English word say, use the sound from the English word sight. (The same goes for seiftesch, which means seventeen.)

For your assignment, look up five telephone numbers on the Internet and write the digits out as Talossan numbers. For example, use an online telephone book to get the phone number of a local restaurant or bowling alley. Turn in the name of the establishment and the URL where you got the number. Don't think I won't call some of the numbers to make sure they are answered by a restaurateur or bowling alley manager.

Familiarize yourself with the following phrases.

• Azul! (Hello!)
  
• Qet isch tu num? (What is your name?)
  
• Va num isch ________. (My name is ________.)
  
• Com'estás't? (How are you?) [don't worry; this looks worse than it is; that is three words kinda crammed into one with apostrophes. This is something we'll discuss soon, and the times it happens are really easy to explain and understand and really, it shouldn't scare an English speaker - think of it just like you think of words like "don't" and "didn't" and "e'er".]
  
• Eu sint ben. Es tu? (I am well. And you?)
  
• Dove vivás't? (Where do you live?) [Now that you know about the Talossan vowels, remember that the word dove, which means "where", is not pronounced like the English word that is spelled the same -- the e is not silent here. Note also that here once again, with vivás't, we have another contraction. You may have noticed that in both cases we've seen so far, the contraction ended with ás't, and the phrase was a question about "you". Yes, the ás and the 't here both mean "you"; we will talk a lot more about that in a few weeks.]
  
• Eu vivéu in _________. (I live in _________.)
  
• Daduv'estás't? (Where are you from?) [I couldn't resist scaring you a little more, but you aren't scared anymore, are you? This isn't that bad. The one weird little quirk here is that the phrase da dove, which means "from where", always magically crams itself together into the single word daduve -- yep, the o changes to a u, just for fun, and then we get the fun of the contraction.]
  
• Eu sint da ___________. (I am from _________.)
  
• Areivi! (Goodbye!)
  

Using the country names in the vocabulary from last week, practice these phrases (again, you might get some consonants wrong in the more exotic looking placenames, but I don't see anything you would have trouble with in the phrases themselves, except maybe the word "qet", but we'll get to the Talossan q next week, won't we?).

INDIVIDUAL TRANSLATION PROJECT ASSIGNMENT:

First, read your chosen text as if the vowels in the words were Talossan. For example, the English word come would be pronounced in two syllables, "koh-meh". (Note that come actually is a very common Talossan word that means "how" or "like". We will see that word a lot -- in fact, you've already seen it, involved in contraction, in one of the practice phrases above.)

After having done that to get practice reading vowels as if they were Talossan....

Change the vowels in your text to Talossan vowels. For example, the English word feast would become fist. Do not worry about being perfect; the aim is that you will still be able (while in your growing "Talossan" frame of mind) to read your altered text and recognize the English words.

COURSE TRANSLATION PROJECT ASSIGNMENT:

No assignment until one of the final weeks. Continue your group discussion.