Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN
Seneschal
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Post by Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN on Sept 25, 2019 16:26:22 GMT -6
Given Cresti and Marcial's admission in another thread that there's no obvious solution to the inconsistent use of Î, I am going to move the following:
the project of orthographic reunision be shelved, in favour of "organically" arriving at consensus by shifting the language in the Sardinian-Berber direction. Up until then, both 1997 and 2014 orthographies shall be equally acceptable.
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Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial
Batetz las maes, perf. —— Freelance glheþineir (I only accept Worthless Internet Points™ as payment)
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Talossan Since: May 12, 2014
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Post by Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial on Sept 25, 2019 16:44:02 GMT -6
I don't know how the two things are related, honestly.
EDIT: One is about how words are spelled, the other is about what words are to be used to begin with.
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Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN
Seneschal
the new Jim Hacker
Posts: 6,635
Talossan Since: 6-25-2004
Dame Since: 9-8-2012
Motto: Expulseascâ, reveneascâ
Baron Since: Feudal titles are for gimps
Duke Since: Feudal titles are for gimps
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Post by Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN on Sept 25, 2019 16:47:57 GMT -6
I don't know how the two things are related, honestly. EDIT: One is about how words are spelled, the other is about what words are to be used to begin with.
The two are related. For example, is there any such phoneme as that signified by the old Talossan Î in Sardinian or nearby languages and/or Berber? If not, we can do without it. Actually, I'm quite excited by the idea of bringing more Berber i.e. Semitic stuff into the language. We might even find a role for a phonemic glottal stop.
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Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial
Batetz las maes, perf. —— Freelance glheþineir (I only accept Worthless Internet Points™ as payment)
Posts: 448
Talossan Since: May 12, 2014
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Post by Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial on Sept 25, 2019 16:51:29 GMT -6
The two are related. For example, is there any such phoneme as that signified by the old Talossan Î in Sardinian or nearby languages and/or Berber? If not, we can do without it. Actually, I'm quite excited by the idea of bringing more Berber i.e. Semitic stuff into the language. We might even find a role for a phonemic glottal stop. Sardinian and Berber languages dont have sounds corresponding to Talossan Ä, Ö, Ü or GLH either. If we push this too far we might as well abandon Talossan wholesale and start learning Sardinian instead.
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Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN
Seneschal
the new Jim Hacker
Posts: 6,635
Talossan Since: 6-25-2004
Dame Since: 9-8-2012
Motto: Expulseascâ, reveneascâ
Baron Since: Feudal titles are for gimps
Duke Since: Feudal titles are for gimps
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Post by Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN on Sept 25, 2019 17:18:37 GMT -6
Well, the question is which project actually provokes the most enthusiasm.
Remember in the old days when we were so keen about getting SIGN started, and the people from CÚG kept appearing us to ask us to stop, and so nothing ever happened? Remember how upset we got about it?
We've had years and years to push forward in the current "Southern Gallo-Romance with random Celticisms and all sorts of things thrown in" direction, and no-one's actually done anything. We never even worked out how to spell it. Now someone suggests moving in a different direction, and it's all like NO.
I am in favour of activity in the language, no matter in which direction. For ages I have tried to get the Ladîntsch community to come to a consensus on which way to move forward - and our response has been to quibble, sigh, and to do nothing. This can't continue.
Pick a direction and move. Either push forward to orthographic reunision of the current language; or we go elsewhere. And I thought you'd given up on the first option.
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Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial
Batetz las maes, perf. —— Freelance glheþineir (I only accept Worthless Internet Points™ as payment)
Posts: 448
Talossan Since: May 12, 2014
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Post by Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial on Sept 25, 2019 17:37:24 GMT -6
We've had years and years to push forward in the current "Southern Gallo-Romance with random Celticisms and all sorts of things thrown in" direction, and no-one's actually done anything. We never even worked out how to spell it. Now someone suggests moving in a different direction, and it's all like NO. I am in favour of activity in the language, no matter in which direction. For ages I have tried to get the Ladîntsch community to come to a consensus on which way to move forward - and our response has been to quibble, sigh, and to do nothing. This can't continue. Pick a direction and move. Either push forward to orthographic reunision of the current language; or we go elsewhere. And I thought you'd given up on the first option. At this point I'd just say "Fuck you all" and abandon Î again, but that would be an arbitrary dictatorial change, which is what we set out to avoid, so...
I don't particularly mind the state of Talossan in general. I wouldn't even mind importing Sardinian vocabulary in future, the only condition I have is that anything we add has to harmonise with what we already have (the last thing we need is another set of prefixes meaning "with" or "not"), and in order to assess what that means in practice we would have to go through the vocabulary and fix the bugs I mentioned near the start of this thread. In the worst case, this will turn out to be another controversy that won't go anywhere for years and years.
As an aside, I have no idea why Ben introduced vür or aic in 1997; The Sardinian words for "man" and "horse" are òmine and caddu respectively; argaz and ayyis respectively in Tamazight.
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Sir C. M. Siervicül
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Post by Sir C. M. Siervicül on Sept 26, 2019 8:21:29 GMT -6
Actually, I'm quite excited by the idea of bringing more Berber i.e. Semitic stuff into the language. We might even find a role for a phonemic glottal stop. Or the çh (1997 orthography)/gh (2007 orthography) sound that was nearly eliminated in 2007 because it's used in so few words. Also, Hooligan and I have had a lot of discussions about whether some of the grammatical pecularities of Talossan could be explained by its nature as a Romance language with a Berber substrate, in terms of verb framing and deixis (for example the go/come merger). Sardinian and Berber languages dont have sounds corresponding to Talossan Ä, Ö, Ü or GLH either. If we push this too far we might as well abandon Talossan wholesale and start learning Sardinian instead. It's true that Sardinian and Berber are both a poor fit for Talossan in terms of vowel inventory--almost on opposite ends of the spectrum. I definitely think we need to proceed carefully. Language mixing or koineisation could help explain why modern Talossan ended up with a larger vowel inventory than Sardinian, similar to how the phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced fricatives in English was influenced both by heavy borrowing from French in the Middle English period and by mixing of English dialects that had different distributions of voiced and unvoiced allophones. I agree with Miestra though that in some cases an emphasis on African Latin/Sardinian could tilt the balance in favor of simplification of the vowel system on questions such as the fate of î and ë. I don't particularly mind the state of Talossan in general. I wouldn't even mind importing Sardinian vocabulary in future, the only condition I have is that anything we add has to harmonise with what we already have I agree, but I think we can work on this incrementally. Pick a general direction to head in, and then each time we need to add vocabulary, work on a particular grammatical feature, etc., we use that direction as a guidepost in choosing between alternative courses of action. As an aside, I have no idea why Ben introduced vür or aic in 1997; The Sardinian words for "man" and "horse" are òmine and caddu respectively; argaz and ayyis respectively in Tamazight. I think those are 97al (African Latin) rather than 97u (Sardinian/Sicilian/Lucanian) words. He was increasingly looking more to sources on attested words from Late Latin as used in Africa rather than borrowing words from other modern languages. So his first preference was to look at actual African Latin sources where available, and only if a suitable word could not be found in such sources turn to other modern languages, starting with Sardinian, Sicilian, etc. Going beyond this approach and the word-borrowing rules in SG, I think we should also consider whether the particular word is one that should be inherited from African Latin (or borrowed from one of the languages we've identified as a good proxy for African Latin) or whether the word is a better candidate for later borrowing from Latin or from a different language (like the Spanish llave/clave distinction that Epic mentioned earlier). This would include considerations of register etc. that are absent from SG's word-borrowing rules. 'Man' and 'horse' IMO are very much the kind of core vocabulary (I'd bet they're both Swadesh list words) that should be inherited from African Latin. As for why Ben picked these particular words, I've read that African Latin continued to use some Classical vocabulary that was replaced by other words in the rest of the Romance world during the Vulgar period. Presumably these are cases where he either founded attested usage of equus and vir in Africa at a time when caballus and homo had largely displaced them in Europe (note however that several Romance languages do have reflexes of equa as a word for 'mare'), or he just felt like those would be good words for Talossan to preserve in a more conservative form. Similarly, Talossan has words for 'big' and 'nothing' that are based on Classical vocabulary ( magnh and nil/ níþil from magnus and nihil, respectively) that were displaced by other words in the varieties of Vulgar Latin that most other Romance languages evolved from ( grandis and nulla rem natam). (The older and probably still more common word for big, grült, is a Germanic borrowing. But we don't have to throw out all such words, of course. We can decide which is the more prevalent word in Modern Talossan on a case-by-case basis, especially if we adopt the view of Talossan as a koiné language with significant influences from dialects that developed in various parts of Europe. As I mentioned, I had been developing a basic vocabulary list, and we can prioritise words for case-by-case review of synonyms based on something like that.)
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Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial
Batetz las maes, perf. —— Freelance glheþineir (I only accept Worthless Internet Points™ as payment)
Posts: 448
Talossan Since: May 12, 2014
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Post by Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial on Sept 26, 2019 18:38:18 GMT -6
I don't particularly mind the state of Talossan in general. I wouldn't even mind importing Sardinian vocabulary in future, the only condition I have is that anything we add has to harmonise with what we already have I agree, but I think we can work on this incrementally. Pick a general direction to head in, and then each time we need to add vocabulary, work on a particular grammatical feature, etc., we use that direction as a guidepost in choosing between alternative courses of action. [emphasis mine]
What does that mean for the currently inconsistent vocabulary? Like; I remember reading the Yahoo! group logs from 2012 where the CÚG voted to replace un- with in- (im- before labials, i- before n, l and r) and -attä with sanc- [EDIT: Quick note that none of this was ever updated on talossan.com] The thing is: does this change only affect new coinages? What about the ~80 words in the dictionary that have un- in their canonical form, or all the words that by the CÚG's decision seven years ago have an irregular unpredictable form of the in- prefix (like illegal).
Sir Tomás also suggested simplifying the different versions if con-/cun-/com-/qom- that I love to rant and rave about into one prefix in May this year, after which I suggested employing the same assimilation rule as in-'s. That change alone would already make learning vocabulary less of a pain in the ass.
If you guys insist, we can keep the irregular terms for backwards compatibility's sake or whatever, but what about at least introducing recommended regular forms?
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Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN
Seneschal
the new Jim Hacker
Posts: 6,635
Talossan Since: 6-25-2004
Dame Since: 9-8-2012
Motto: Expulseascâ, reveneascâ
Baron Since: Feudal titles are for gimps
Duke Since: Feudal titles are for gimps
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Post by Miestrâ Schivâ, UrN on Sept 26, 2019 21:19:50 GMT -6
]If you guys insist, we can keep the irregular terms for backwards compatibility's sake or whatever, but what about at least introducing recommended regular forms? [/div][/quote] That's exactly what I and, I think, Cresti have been suggesting re: the Sardinian/Berber direction. If the regular forms are Sardinian or Berber in style/form, I think we're all on the same page here.
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