Most Insane Languages: Follow Up Poll

[baradsonoron]

Alright, here's the poll I put together.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/11uCeLP ... 0/viewform

Enjoy!

[baradsonoron]

By the way, this is a followup to the requisite thread.

[Nortaneous]

it's kusunda, not kunuda

[baradsonoron]

Thanks. will fix.

[Click]

You have ǃXóõ under Strangest Phonology, but !Xoo under Strangest Language. Be consistent.

[Qwynegold]

Japanese in Hiragana/Katakana/Hanji

It's called kanji. And it's only kanji that's ill suited for Japanese; hiragana/katakana fit perfectly.

[Zhen Lin]

Japanese in Hiragana/Katakana/Hanji

It's called kanji. And it's only kanji that's ill suited for Japanese; hiragana/katakana fit perfectly.

Japanese should win hands down. There's no way that an orthography where 山上復有山 can spell /ide/ can be considered sane...

[2+3 clusivity]

Sogdian in Brahmi? Unless I missed something, I thought Sogdian was written in the Sogdian Script and other related scripts. If you have a link or source I'd be interested to see what they did . . . even so what would be odd about an abugida with an Iranian language?

Are you instead thinking of the Saka language? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saka_language; e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Book_ ... _5R1_1.jpg.

[Xephyr]

Sogdian in Brahmi? Unless I missed something, I thought Sogdian was written in the Sogdian Script and other related scripts.

Yes, also Chinese is written in hanzi, not Arabic, and Sumerian is written in cuneiform, not Greek. Did you miss the original thread? And yeah, some Sogdian was written in the Sogdian script. Other Sogdian was written in the Manichean script, or the Nestorian script... and the distribution of the three writing systems often does not match up with the division of Sogdian into Buddhist, Christian, and Manichaean Sogdian (in fact, the majority of "Buddhist Sogdian" literature is written in the Manichean script. Or maybe it was the other way around, I can't remember and can't find the citation.)

If you have a link or source I'd be interested to see what they did

"Similarly, Brahmi script was applied to write texts translated from Sanskrit (or
Tocharian as well?) , either of Buddhist or medical contents. However, only a small
number of Brahmi fragments have so far been encountered among the treasures
unearthed from Central Asia (see Sims-Williams I 996c)."
-- Yutaka Yoshida, The Iranian Languages, ed. Gernot Windfuhr, p. 281

. . . even so what would be odd about an abugida with an Iranian language?

Not easily impressed, I see!

[CatDoom]

Hard to be at ǃXóõ for insane phonology; I mean, it's the only language I know of that'll give you a lump on your larynx if you speak it enough.

[Nortaneous]

What about that language, N||ng or whatever, where not only are there clicks and so on, there aren't alveolar plosives? (I wonder if that's one of the tribes where the people don't have an alveolar ridge.)

Japanese in Hiragana/Katakana/Hanji

It's called kanji. And it's only kanji that's ill suited for Japanese; hiragana/katakana fit perfectly.

Japanese should win hands down. There's no way that an orthography where 山上復有山 can spell /ide/ can be considered sane...

How does that work?

[Zhen Lin]

Japanese should win hands down. There's no way that an orthography where 山上復有山 can spell /ide/ can be considered sane...

How does that work?

It's a rebus. /ide/ is normally spelled 出で, or just 出. 山上復有山 means "one 山 over another 山".

[clawgrip]

Sogdian in Brahmi? Unless I missed something, I thought Sogdian was written in the Sogdian Script and other related scripts. If you have a link or source I'd be interested to see what they did . . . even so what would be odd about an abugida with an Iranian language?

Are you instead thinking of the Saka language? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saka_language; e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Book_ ... _5R1_1.jpg.

Totally off-topic and a shameless excuse to show something I've done, but I'm so happy to see that someone else is actually aware of the existence of the Khotanese script. I mostly deciphered it myself due to lack of material on the Internet, and have been in the process of making a font of it. Here is the section of the book of Zambasta you pasted, written out using my font. My font is based on a slightly earlier style of penmanship than the script in that image.

[2+3 clusivity]

Totally off-topic and a shameless excuse to show something I've done, but I'm so happy to see that someone else is actually aware of the existence of the Khotanese script. I mostly deciphered it myself due to lack of material on the Internet, and have been in the process of making a font of it. Here is the section of the book of Zambasta you pasted, written out using my font. My font is based on a slightly earlier style of penmanship than the script in that image.

Hungh! And you said that you've turned that into a font? That looks really awesome.

Have you also done: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... t_4-1.jpeg as well? And, without images, http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etc ... /khots.htm.

Did you translate it or just do the script? If you have any more work on either, I'd be thrilled to see it. I tend to work on NIA and Dardic languages so that would be up/near my alley.

Looking at the script--both the originals and yours--really reminds me of the somewhat distantly related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_script.

*Edit* Also, found this: http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Khotanese.html. I was interested to see they put voiceless aspirates in the phonology . . . assuming that is accurate, I am not sure what to make of that, whether a remnant in Iranian or reborrowed from Indo-Aryan langauges. Oddly, the phonology seems practically ripped out of Kashmiri (without palatalization) and the--hah--Kohistani branch of Dardic (for example: Palula and Torwali). This seems to have an idea: http://www.academia.edu/1748443/Introdu ... in_German_.

[clawgrip]

Totally off-topic and a shameless excuse to show something I've done, but I'm so happy to see that someone else is actually aware of the existence of the Khotanese script. I mostly deciphered it myself due to lack of material on the Internet, and have been in the process of making a font of it. Here is the section of the book of Zambasta you pasted, written out using my font. My font is based on a slightly earlier style of penmanship than the script in that image.

Hungh! And you said that you've turned that into a font? That looks really awesome.

Thanks. The image I linked to is a sample of my own font. It is not finished and the arrangements of glyphs within the font is still completely haphazard (because A) there is no clear unicode support for Khotanese, and B) I don't quite know how to make Indic scripts that form ligatures and the like automatically).

Have you also done: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... t_4-1.jpeg as well? And, without images, http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etc ... /khots.htm.

I'll make you an image of this first one later on if you want to see it. I don't quite have all the necessary glyphs, but I'm working on it.
The TITUS website was extremely helpful for me in deciphering the script and creating the font. I've been using these transliterations and the extremely high quality images at Dunhuang Project to make them. Unfortunately the Dunhuang images and the TITUS transliterations do not use the same classification scheme, so I actually have to read the text in the images on the Dunhuang site and then search for the corresponding transliteration on TITUS to find out which is which.

Did you translate it or just do the script? If you have any more work on either, I'd be thrilled to see it. I tend to work on NIA and Dardic languages so that would be up/near my alley.

I know very little about the Khotanese language itself. My font, of course, only represents the script. Of course, I have created a number of ligatures that commonly appear in the script. Mostly the only things I know about Khotanese I have garnered from spending a lot of time looking at texts (I can tell for instance that it must have cases or something similar, because I've seen various words with changes to the final vowels, like gyastä balysä, gyastu balysu, gyastä balysi, etc.). I do know that certain ligatures actually represent individual phonemes, like ys I believe is /z/ or something similar, and that ṣṣ and śś are not geminates but digraphs representing single phonemes. There are also clear borrowings from Sanskrit that probably don't represent distinct phonemes in Khotanese (like syllabic r̥).

Looking at the script--both the originals and yours--really reminds me of the somewhat distantly related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_script.

Ranjana script is somewhat closely related. Another one that is similar to Ranjana but more closely related to Khotanese and Tocharian is Siddham, which is still often used by Buddhists in Japan.

*Edit* Also, found this: http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Khotanese.html. I was interested to see they put voiceless aspirates in the phonology . . . assuming that is accurate, I am not sure what to make of that, whether a remnant in Iranian or reborrowed from Indo-Aryan langauges. Oddly, the phonology seems practically ripped out of Kashmiri (without palatalization) and the--hah--Kohistani branch of Dardic (for example: Palula and Torwali). This seems to have an idea: http://www.academia.edu/1748443/Introdu ... in_German_.

Based on the script alone, kh and th are probably the most frequently encountered voiceless aspirate letters, followed by ṭh and ph. ch is quite rare. Voiced aspirates are even more rare, so rare in fact that I have never found an example of jh, so I have no idea what it looks like or if it even exists. among the nasals, ñ, ṇ, n, and m are all common, but ṅ never appears except before a velar stop. It's interesting to look at that phoneme inventory and try to figure out how it matches the script (the lack of anything that jh could be appropriated for is telling).

[2+3 clusivity]

Voiced aspirates are even more rare, so rare in fact that I have never found an example of jh, so I have no idea what it looks like or if it even exists.

I think that the rareness of <jh> is probably due to its rareness in Sanskrit. This source hints at that rareness: http://www.hakuoh.ac.jp/camnavi/kyoken_ ... c_2004.pdf at page 13, and I think Colin Masica's Indo-aryan languages says something similar but I am not finding the correct page.

As an aside also, notice Khotanese's developement's on pp. 70 and 74 in the source quoted above more closely match the results of Vedic regarding both (af)fricat(iv)es and retroflexes than those in other Iranian languages in http://www.academia.edu/1748443/Introdu ... in_German_ on pp. 10-12. And, most tellingly the maintenance/development of voiceless aspirates in Khotanese seems to--perhaps--mirror those in Vedic. Based on phonology alone, I would be tempted to lump Khotanese into the Aryan ~ Dardic branch of Indo-Iranian.

I know very little about the Khotanese language itself. My font, of course, only represents the script. Of course, I have created a number of ligatures that commonly appear in the script. Mostly the only things I know about Khotanese I have garnered from spending a lot of time looking at texts (I can tell for instance that it must have cases or something similar, because I've seen various words with changes to the final vowels, like gyastä balysä, gyastu balysu, gyastä balysi, etc.). I do know that certain ligatures actually represent individual phonemes, like ys I believe is /z/ or something similar, and that ṣṣ and śś are not geminates but digraphs representing single phonemes.

I am not sure if you have seen this, which may be very helpful: http://books.google.com/books?id=QtpQZ1 ... 22&f=false, specifically the discussion on pp. 381-82 and the illustration on p. 380.

[clawgrip]

The illustration on page 180 won't display for me, but it sounds interesting. I think it says "copyrighted image" so I guess it won't display. If you could take a screenshot I would appreciate it.

I am kind of interested in making a Tumshuqese font as well if I can find more information on it (there isn't much). I might settle for a cursive Khotanese font eventually. If I can find the resources I would like eventually to produce quality fonts of Khotanese, Tumshuqese, and Tocharian.

[2+3 clusivity]

Hungh, it displayed this morning. Try back in a few days, but it was a full "alphabet" of the Khotanese script.

[clawgrip]

Looks like it's a no-go, which is unfortunate because it looks like it says it has examples of Early Turkestan Brahmi, Early South Turkestan Brahmi, South Turkestan Brahmi, and Late Turkestan Brahmi. I'd like to see how they are distinguished.

[finlay]

Japanese should win hands down. There's no way that an orthography where 山上復有山 can spell /ide/ can be considered sane...

How does that work?

It's a rebus. /ide/ is normally spelled 出で, or just 出. 山上復有山 means "one 山 over another 山".

But a rebus or puzzle is not the same as actually writing something a particular way. Just to reinforce that point further, I just showed it to a Japanese person and the first words out of her mouth were "imi wakannai", followed by "sanjou ... chigau". That makes this at best no better than "ghoti", which as we all know can't ACTUALLY be pronounced fish.

[Zhen Lin]

Japanese should win hands down. There's no way that an orthography where 山上復有山 can spell /ide/ can be considered sane...

How does that work?

It's a rebus. /ide/ is normally spelled 出で, or just 出. 山上復有山 means "one 山 over another 山".

But a rebus or puzzle is not the same as actually writing something a particular way. Just to reinforce that point further, I just showed it to a Japanese person and the first words out of her mouth were "imi wakannai", followed by "sanjou ... chigau". That makes this at best no better than "ghoti", which as we all know can't ACTUALLY be pronounced fish.

Unlike "ghoti", this is actually attested in the written corpus not explicitly as a rebus: Man'yōshu (vol. 9) poem #1787.

[clawgrip]

A single attestation by a single poet can hardly be considered representative of the language in general. Not that I'm arguing against man'yōgana or even modern Japanese orthography being extremely complicated, I just don't think 山上復有山 is a particularly useful example. Plus I guess you mean Old Japanese orthography, not modern Japanese, since the language of the man'yōshu is unintelligible to modern Japanese speakers (the way you responded to Qwynegold made it appear as though this usage was current/common).

[Zhen Lin]

It's not an isolated occurrence – there are other rebuses in the Man'yōshū – and although the rebuses have perhaps gone extinct, the spirit of such "creative" orthography lives on in modern Japanese, thanks to (ab)use of furigana. Try reading a light novel sometime...