Lenani is up

[Mornche Geddick]

My first attempt at a sentence is OS. Here goes:

"Ngel-asum ngliussador irrarkul"

The dog ate our dinner.

(The dash is a retroflex I couldn't see on the browser, and "ng" is that velar nasal.)

[vec]

Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!

[zompist]

What makes a medial /trg/ so much more difficult than an initial one? If anything I'd kinda expect the "trga" to take an epenthetic vowel instead of *utrga.

For me, /trga/ is actually easier to say than /utrga/. With the first, I get a kind of rhotic release of the t; but with the second, I divide it ut-rga and find it hard to say without putting a glottal stop or an epenthetic vowel in there.

I should probably clarify that where an epenthetic vowel is mentioned in the text, there is textual evidence for it. It's very possible that vowels were added elsewhere, but the Skourenese didn't bother to write them.

[linguofreak]

I just uploaded some corrections, including that lumpish specification of the Gentium font for Windows. There's a link in the text to the Gentium download page.

It's a small world. My dad works with the guy that designed Gentium (and I myself have met him in passing when I was 7 or so). He also works with one of the members of the project team. Cool.

As for Old Skourene:
YES!!!! The gender system is what I consider perfect! I have used pretty much the same thing in several of my conlangs because it's so logical (in fact, until I decided that I would make the gender system of Gelveasar into something less than perfect, it had that system). The only difference is that I use masculine and feminine for living things of known gender, and animate for living things of unknown or neuter gender and for mixed groups.
I like the gender agreement on the verb too.

I agree with Maknas that "uturga" doesn't need the u between the t and the r, as long as the r is a liquid and not a tap or trill, it should easily become syllabic, like in American English "bird" [br\d], [br\`d] or in my dialect: [bM\`d]. (what's X-Sampa for rhoticized velar approximant? I guessed with M\`). However, it's your lang, so if you want to make an exception to the untwistableness of Skourene tounges, I can't complain.

I've always liked tri- (or multi-) consonantal root languages, but I've never been able to do one well. I a quadconsonantal that was a bigtime flop. You, on the other hand, have made something rather spectacular.

Question: Since s is dental, shouldn't it be represented as ? or ??

[alice]

Especially since my current project is my first ergative language!

Cool. Have you made a thread about it?

Not yet. It should appear "soon", though...

[vec]

Question: Since s is dental, shouldn't it be represented as ? or ??

No, not if it's sibilant. Then s is more logical. Dental-s sounds like a shower, and indeed, when I say it I actually produce a shower... /T/ and /D/ are spirant fricatives. Sibilants are of much higher frequency than spirants, they're so high up they surpass even vowels.

[Aszev]

Question: Since s is dental, shouldn't it be represented as ? or ??

There is nothing to confuse it with so there's no reason.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Before leaving for my daily training, I read a part of the page. It was a marvellous read.

I like the idea of a mostly verbal language (it almost felt like something natural to me). I'm still questionning myself on which Almean language to learn. I thought of Kebreni, but then, reading about Old Skourene, hmmm...

[brandrinn]

I like the idea of a mostly verbal language (it almost felt like something natural to me). I'm still questionning myself on which Almean language to learn. I thought of Kebreni, but then, reading about Old Skourene, hmmm...

i like both of those langs too, mostly because of the verbal systems. in both cases, it's almost like Anti-English. i just dont like the phonology of either. the Cadhinorian languages sound better to me (even Barakhinei) for some reason.

anyway, OS is awesome! i knew it was only a matter of time before Mr. Rosenfelder created a triconsonantal root language for Almea, and the littoral family seems like a good choice, because of their later conversion to Islam/Jippirasti. i especially liked the deletion of the stem vowel to form the negative! i wonder what sound changes produced this quirk? fascinating.

anyway, i'm done brown-nosing.

[valinta]

Kebreni has always been one of my favorites, particularly for the verbal system (concise!). I read the whole grammar of it one time and did a lot of practice; I should go re-learn it.

[Curlyjimsam]

This is making me feel depressed, useless and all the general rest of it ... s'pose it's the best I can do to offer Mark a smiley or two:



Sehr goodness. Incredible, actually.

[Shm Jay]

I dreamt last night that I read an article which reported that Dame Judi Dench starred in a movie set during the Raj where she played *both* a Princess of Wales who came to India to recover her health and the Indian heroine. There were riots from BJP supporters about this insult to Indian-ness and that an Indian was not given the part of the Indian heroine. A general criticized Dame Judi Dench.

And in my dream, I translated that article into Lenani.

[Jipí]

That's very nice work, Zomp!

[ged]

This is a phenomenal achievement -- very inspiring. I like the ergativity, natural gender, the proper names, the writing system, the (s)ample texts, the conjugation utility, the easter egg...

Nitpicks
- The page ends in .htm instead of .html like all the other pages (Windows is corrupting you, Zomp!)
- I kept reading OS as Object Subject
- The gender bullet list should be a hierarchy
- The conjugation utility shoud have a <NOSCRIPT> tag
- The P0/C1/P12/C2/P23/C3/P4 is very VisiCalc; I prefer a Lotus-style AFEMILO notation

Wish List
- More glyphs
- "Langmaker" written in the script
- "Share the Secret Vice - Invent a language!" translated into Old Skourene

[brandrinn]

- I kept reading OS as Object Subject

yeah, me too. maybe OSK?

- The P0/C1/P12/C2/P23/C3/P4 is very VisiCalc; I prefer a Lotus-style AFEMILO notation

the former seems much less ambiguous to me.

[butsuri]

Most impressive, and the language has a number of features I rather like. I'll make further comments when I've read in more detail.

But first, a technical note - in a number of places, the HTML has improperly nested b and font tags, for instance

Code: Select all

<b><font color="#008000">Me&#x014b;eland</b></font>

which causes Konqueror to stop using the specified font (i.e. Gentium) from that point onward.

(I'd also point out that Gentium doesn't even have a bold form, so the b tags don't have any visible effect. Unfortunately, I can't think of a freely available font with a bold form and the characters you need, although the DejaVu family will get there eventually. Oh, wait, looks like FreeSerif does. Not quite as easy to get and install, though.)

[Dewrad]

(I'd also point out that Gentium doesn't even have a bold form, so the b tags don't have any visible effect. Unfortunately, I can't think of a freely available font with a bold form and the characters you need, although the DejaVu family will get there eventually. Oh, wait, looks like FreeSerif does. Not quite as easy to get and install, though.)

The above is why I had to monkey around with my browser's settings to get it to display legibly- I can't stand long text in Gentium. On the other hand, it's both legible and aesthetically pleasing (and includes bolding) with FreeSerif. IMHO, I would have preferred it if Zomp hadn't actually specified a font for the page- apart from IE, most browsers will come up with the goods automatically.

[linguofreak]

(I'd also point out that Gentium doesn't even have a bold form, so the b tags don't have any visible effect. Unfortunately, I can't think of a freely available font with a bold form and the characters you need, although the DejaVu family will get there eventually. Oh, wait, looks like FreeSerif does. Not quite as easy to get and install, though.)

But gentium has bold. I'm seeing it just fine.

[butsuri]

The above is why I had to monkey around with my browser's settings to get it to display legibly- I can't stand long text in Gentium. On the other hand, it's both legible and aesthetically pleasing (and includes bolding) with FreeSerif. IMHO, I would have preferred it if Zomp hadn't actually specified a font for the page- apart from IE, most browsers will come up with the goods automatically.

I agree - even without the bold issue, I really dislike Gentium as a screen font. (It's OK at large size, and may well be very nice in print.) As to whether a font should be specified at all, in general I agree with you. However, Konqueror can apparently only do font substitution on a range-by-range basis, so I tend to miss out on characters that aren't in Verdana. I haven't found a free sans-serif font that looks good on the screen, has good coverage of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, and doesn't include other ranges that I want to use script-specific fonts for. I'm hoping DejaVu Sans will qualify soon.

But gentium has bold. I'm seeing it just fine.

Excuse me, but it does not. Your system must be faking it. From the SIL website:

SIL International has now embraced the Gentium project, and plans to continue development. Expansion of the glyph set to include more extended Latin glyphs, archaic Greek symbols, and full Cyrillic script support is the next step. Work on this has already begun, but the results will not be available for a few months. Addition of bold and bold italic faces will follow.

[...]

What about bold?

The next major release of Gentium (sometime in 2005) will include Bold and Bold Italic weights. We've already done three prototypes, and will be making some design decisions soon. Be patient, though, as Gentium has lots of glyphs!

[butsuri]

Fontwise, unfortunately there's a problem with FreeSerif too - it displays italic n for italic eng, which is obviously not ideal.

[zompist]

But first, a technical note - in a number of places, the HTML has improperly nested b and font tags, for instance

Code: Select all

<b><font color="#008000">Me&#x014b;eland</b></font>

which causes Konqueror to stop using the specified font (i.e. Gentium) from that point onward.

Sorry about that; but it can't really be fixed without rewriting my rtf-to-html utility entirely. I try to fix some of the oddities using replace, but this one can't be caught that way.

(I'd also point out that Gentium doesn't even have a bold form, so the b tags don't have any visible effect.

It looks fine on Safari.

If there's better font alternatives, I'd be happy to hear them; but I do need something that works for Windows IE.

[Blackhand]

If there's better font alternatives, I'd be happy to hear them; but I do need something that works for Windows IE.

...
IE can only be threatened and cajoled into working; it will never do it on its own volition.

[Circeus]

I guess Firefox must be having display issues, because all of the retroflexes are showing up as somewhat oversized. They're shaped like lower case letters, but with upper case proportions.

I think that's happened to me with Gecko-based browsers before(namely Camino). They never did seem to be as good at text display as WebKit-based browsers.

I think that's because Firefox resorts to a different font to display just these characters, and that font has different proportions. It used to do the same things to me in my files until I switched to a font that encompassed the whole thing.

THe specific is: Since there is no font specified in the document, Firefox goes for it's default font, whatever it is, and resort to the first font it finds having the glyph when a character is not supported by the default font. If a font was actually spefified in the document and present on the user's computer, I think we'd get interrogation marks (the equivalent of boxes in Ffx)

[butsuri]

Sorry about that; but it can't really be fixed without rewriting my rtf-to-html utility entirely. I try to fix some of the oddities using replace, but this one can't be caught that way.

I've fixed a local copy by hand - I can send you the corrected version if you like.

If there's better font alternatives, I'd be happy to hear them; but I do need something that works for Windows IE.

Presumably anything that worked for me would work equally well in Windows, but I can't think of any appropriate fonts which solve that problem other from FreeSerif, which introduces its own. (I've just added italic ŋ glyphs to FreeSerifItalic.ttf, but obviously that's a little much to expect of everyone.)

Personally, I'd suggest that Doulos SIL makes a better screen font than Gentium, at least, though it doesn't actually solve this specific problem.

[ged]

Sorry about that; but it can't really be fixed without rewriting my rtf-to-html utility entirely. I try to fix some of the oddities using replace, but this one can't be caught that way.

My stream of consciousness:

1. What a waste of time that he would write an rtf-to-html utility.
2. Rats, I've written that exact same utility myself.
3. Double rats, I'm writing and maintaining a complete content-management system.
4. You know, I've read the RTF 1.0 specification at least twice.
5. I bet we could fix the nesting problem using a stack.
6. "My stream of consciousness..."