I can't find anything about these Arabist half-circles, unless you mean the characters given in Unicode as MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING (U+02BF) and MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING (U+02BE), used to transliterate the ain and hamzah respectively. These are superscript characters and look more like an apostrophe than a letter, so perhaps that's not what you're talking about. But in Arabic, you have a lot of sounds that can't be conveniently expressed in Roman letters without diacritics and other additions, so they're bound to go beyond common characters from the beginning.
The fact remains that an apostrophe (or reversed apostrophe, or similar symbol) is the most common strategy for representing a phonemic glottal stop in roman script. If it does not catch the eye as a letter, then at least it does not catch the eye as a numeral, dragging that numeral's name into the mind with it. The apostrophe is designed, typographically, to be inserted into words; the numerals are designed to stand out from them.
Yes, there's some cross-linguistic ambiguity, but that's true of many letters, and it doesn't prevent you from using <c> or <h>.
And, to an English speaker at least, as a sound the glottal stop is hardly there at all - what better character to represent it than one that is very small, and normally silent? (This last is admittedly something of a mixed blessing, as it may not impress on the reader the equality of the glottal stop with other phonemes, but remember that the Arabic hamzah is not a normal letter either.)
But seriously, I don't mind the 7s. I just think it's eccentric not to use the more standard option when Flaidish has no other use for it.
Flaidish ba7se 7empo
Those are probably the Unicode points. Remember that fonts vary; the examples I have to hand (The World's Writing Systems) and Bernard Lewis's The Middle East) both present them as rather larger and less mathematical-looking than the examples in my Unicode manual. I've also seen them as very large but sans-serif.butsuri wrote:I can't find anything about these Arabist half-circles, unless you mean the characters given in Unicode as MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING (U+02BF) and MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING (U+02BE), used to transliterate the ain and hamzah respectively. These are superscript characters and look more like an apostrophe than a letter, so perhaps that's not what you're talking about. But in Arabic, you have a lot of sounds that can't be conveniently expressed in Roman letters without diacritics and other additions, so they're bound to go beyond common characters from the beginning.
They're pretty obviously adaptations of the apostrophes used traditionally, precisely to make them look more like letters, and to allow use of the ordinary apostrophes. There's nothing about Arabic that requires those particular transliterations; The World's Major Languages and Lyovin's Introduction to the Languages of the World use the IPA glottal stop symbol and the Maltese barred h.
Beyond that, all I can say is that your arguments don't address any of mine (and perhaps you feel the same). Yes, the apostrophes are traditional; and it's also traditional for non-scholars to simply ignore and omit them. (How many news sources ever mentioned that the first letter of the name Iraq in Arabic isn't an I?) Instead of clinging to a system that doesn't work, I'd rather (like the Arabists and the inventors of pinyin) find one that works better.
The representation of Arab in the Latin alphabeth is to be furtherly complicated by the tendency that at least names are written differently depending on wether the country from wich the person or place comes was under British or French rule in colonialist times. (At least, that's what I've noticed in texts written in German; perhaps it's different in texts written in other languages).
I don't know about glottal stops in general and what options you have for webpages, but as for the glottal stop in Arab, if the Maltese use a barred h for it, why not follow them in situations where it is possible? They are after all, AFAIK, the only people speaking a language extremely close to Arab who use the Latin alphabeth in daily life.
I don't know about glottal stops in general and what options you have for webpages, but as for the glottal stop in Arab, if the Maltese use a barred h for it, why not follow them in situations where it is possible? They are after all, AFAIK, the only people speaking a language extremely close to Arab who use the Latin alphabeth in daily life.
That much about how they think about each other- but how much contact is there between them? Is it perhaps more than between Ilii and humans, since the Flaids live on an island and the Ilii have a higher opinion of them than of most humans?zompist wrote:More cordial than that between humans and ilii. The flaids view the ilii with great respect. The religious difference is papered over: the ilii consider Irreanism to be on the right track (they equate Good with God). The flaids think they go a bit overhead in taking the names of gods seriously, but they like the stories.Raphael wrote:BTW, you've told us a bit about Flaid-human relations, but how is the relationship between Flaids and Ilii?
I have heard more than once over the years that at least one real-world culture employs this same metaphor for time--almost exactly as the flaids do (one of the South American peoples, I believe). In particular, at least one writer explaining the idea compared trying to guess the future to "looking over one's shoulder."Julao wrote:It is interesting that the Flaids walk backwards through time, so the future is behind and the past is ahead.
I don't have any solid information on these cultures, however, or even any proof that they exist (as opposed to being simply a philosophical construct). Does anyone know anything about this?p@,
Glenn
P.S. I should add that I really enjoy the Flaidish preposition system--the way in which suffixes can be added to the preposition itself (as opposed to the noun) to give locative, allative, and ablative meanings. (I had to read that section several times before I actually understood how it works--just slow, I guess.
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I don't know about not releasing any air, but if I aspirate it, I can pronounce three in a row pretty easily. Maybe it's because I'm used to Klingon, where two in a row isn't uncommon.Julao wrote:Its funny that this thread is number 777. How would you pronounce that... to close your glottis three times without releasing any air...
Heh, I borrowed that feature from those exotic languages, English and French. Of course, neither of them generalizes it to all locative prepositions, as Flaidish does.Glenn Kempf wrote:I should add that I really enjoy the Flaidish preposition system--the way in which suffixes can be added to the preposition itself (as opposed to the noun) to give locative, allative, and ablative meanings. (I had to read that section several times before I actually understood how it works--just slow, I guess.
Raphael-- the ilii do have more contact with the flaids, to the extent that the flaids are perhaps the only Thinking Kind that doesn't consider the ilii to be standoffish.
zompist wrote:Beyond that, all I can say is that your arguments don't address any of mine (and perhaps you feel the same).
Not all my points directly addressed yours, and I may have left some of yours uncontested, but there were other correspondances. I'm not going to try to prove it by matching up text from the two posts, which would be tedious both to write and to read.
If you really think roman letters plus <7> is a better orthography than roman letters plus <'> then by all means use it, but for the reasons I gave above I don't see the advantage.
Well, as I said before, I want people to get past this-- yes, I realize the 7's annoy some people-- OK, noted. I only responded again because of the implication that my only reason was that I'd read too many bad comics. Abuse of the apostrophe by bad conlangers is one reason to avoid it, but I've given quite a few others.butsuri wrote:zompist wrote:Beyond that, all I can say is that your arguments don't address any of mine (and perhaps you feel the same).
Not all my points directly addressed yours, and I may have left some of yours uncontested, but there were other correspondances. I'm not going to try to prove it by matching up text from the two posts, which would be tedious both to write and to read.
If you really think roman letters plus <7> is a better orthography than roman letters plus <'> then by all means use it, but for the reasons I gave above I don't see the advantage.
Raphael, the barred-h isn't used in Maltese for the glottal stop; so far as I can see from some quick web searches, it uses q instead. Q wouldn't be a bad choice, but to me it suggests [q].
Like I said on the last page, the Romans were one. I found the reference in my old Latin class textbook - this is from As the Romans Did by Jo-Ann Shelton, quoting a description of a triumph:Glenn Kempf wrote:I have heard more than once over the years that at least one real-world culture employs this same metaphor for time--almost exactly as the flaids do (one of the South American peoples, I believe). In particular, at least one writer explaining the idea compared trying to guess the future to "looking over one's shoulder."
And this sentence gets a footnote:...a public slave rode in the chariot with the general, holding above his head a crown with precious gems set in gold. And the slave kept saying to him, "Look behind!" warning him to consider the future and events yet to come, and not to become haughty and arrogant because of present events.
It really doesn't seem like that unusual a metaphor to me. You know what happened to you in the past, you can see it, so obviously that's the direction you're facing; the future sneaks up on you, from behind.The Romans thought that the future came up on you from behind, catching you unaware if you had not looked behind you. Today we think the future is ahead of us; we speak of looking ahead.
Hey, the flaids are sensible people.Penelope wrote:It really doesn't seem like that unusual a metaphor to me. You know what happened to you in the past, you can see it, so obviously that's the direction you're facing; the future sneaks up on you, from behind.
I'm pretty sure I got the idea from George Lakoff (who's devoted a large part of his career to exploring families of metaphors).
Ok, I know this thread is about the Flaidish language, but it's the newest one on a Flaid-related topic, I have one more question about Irreanism, and I didn't want to start another thread.
What's the Irreanist position on work ethics? Of course one cannot compare being lazy to torturing or oppressing people, but on the other hand, if everyone would be lazy, nothing would be produced anymore, and everyone would starve. So do the Flaids see lazyness as evil or not?
What's the Irreanist position on work ethics? Of course one cannot compare being lazy to torturing or oppressing people, but on the other hand, if everyone would be lazy, nothing would be produced anymore, and everyone would starve. So do the Flaids see lazyness as evil or not?
Jeerio's mother would have some pretty strong opinions on the subject, none of which have registered with Jeerio yet.Raphael wrote:What's the Irreanist position on work ethics? Of course one cannot compare being lazy to torturing or oppressing people, but on the other hand, if everyone would be lazy, nothing would be produced anymore, and everyone would starve. So do the Flaids see lazyness as evil or not?
The usual Irreanist analysis is that laziness isn't an evil in itself, but it can be one indirectly. If you're not doing anything productive, well, you're not doing anything good, and your inaction may be allowing evil things to develop. And it's certainly a bad thing (if you're able-bodied) to let other people take care of you.
They'd also point out that work itself isn't an unmixed good. If you're doing evil, after all, then working hard at it is no virtue.
i'm at three years and counting -
So Haleza Grise
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I have a question: Are Flaidish long vowels pure? This would mean that English-speakers would have to be a little bit careful about how they pronounced them.
Secondly, what vowel combinations are permitted in Flaidish? I was surprised to see that seo was a valid word; i would have thought it would have to have been se7o.
A couple of assorted typos:
Shouldn't the Flaidish spelling of Luke be Look, not Luuk?
In the gloss for the conditional sentence "If you cooked catfish . . .", the word garchet isn't glossed.
In the sentence ?It?s a wise flaid who studies Irreanism?, the word for Irreanism appears as Irreanattet rather than 7irranattet.
I'm starting to get quite attached to those sevens now . . .
Secondly, what vowel combinations are permitted in Flaidish? I was surprised to see that seo was a valid word; i would have thought it would have to have been se7o.
A couple of assorted typos:
Shouldn't the Flaidish spelling of Luke be Look, not Luuk?
In the gloss for the conditional sentence "If you cooked catfish . . .", the word garchet isn't glossed.
In the sentence ?It?s a wise flaid who studies Irreanism?, the word for Irreanism appears as Irreanattet rather than 7irranattet.
I'm starting to get quite attached to those sevens now . . .
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I'm inclined to think not. Then for once I can leave out the little warning to English speakers to purify their vowels.So Haleza Grise wrote:I have a question: Are Flaidish long vowels pure? This would mean that English-speakers would have to be a little bit careful about how they pronounced them.
Unless I've slipped up somewhere, all adjacent vowels are borrowings. There are enough of them, however, that they are tolerated in Flaidish. Seo is a learned borrowing; more popular words like leste7o 'restaurant' are likely to be nativized with the glottal stop.Secondly, what vowel combinations are permitted in Flaidish? I was surprised to see that seo was a valid word; i would have thought it would have to have been se7o.
You know, listening to my own speech, I have a hard time deciding if a particular word has [ju] or not, and I think I'm prone to hypercorrection. AHD at least agrees that it's [luk].Shouldn't the Flaidish spelling of Luke be Look, not Luuk?
Thanks for pointing out the typos!
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So Haleza Grise
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So Haleza Grise
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