The Wede:i family

[zompist]

I am personally tickled by the contrast between



and



The language itself has been improved almost as much.

[doctrellor]

It looks good Zomp...ya did a good job

[pharazon]

Ah, more Wedei! Cuolese, Jeori, sound changes, even Unicode... *salivates*. Excellent indeed.

[Ghost]

*drools*

This'll take me a while to read through - I've never read the previous wede:i grammar, but anything coming from Mark rosenfelder has got to be good, ne?

EDIT: and you put Jeerio up! Even better! Oh, and what does 'inexorable' mean?

Ghost

[Warmaster]

Nicely done. i was surprised that you brought jeori "back" into existance. i thought it was long forgotten, but its nice to see a ressurection taking place. however, i never did managed to compitently get my head around wede:i, perhaps i'd get it this time. and the new map looks amazing, its good to see some deatail is begining to shift to the south (i want more skouras though *hint*)

And jeerio, thats just soo twee. those pictures make it seem so sweet it is great. the story is really fun as well. i wish i could have wrote like that when i was 11.

Great job there, niice way to opent the new year

[Gareth]

Great stuff, I particularly like how odd the interlinear translations sound. A couple of questions about Wede:i:
How do you prounounce "j"?
There are a few medial clusters like kz' and kg. Are they pronounced as written or is there assimilation to gz' and gg?

[zompist]

A couple of questions about Wede:i:
How do you prounounce "j"?
There are a few medial clusters like kz' and kg. Are they pronounced as written or is there assimilation to gz' and gg?

1. Uncertain, actually. From the modern languages we would reconstruct /dZ/ (like English j), though the exact manner of articulation is debatable. Axunashin <b>j</b> however seems to have been a fricative /J/, the voiced version of /?/, and this may be influenced by Wede:i.

2. In the east, these eventually assimilated to gz / gg, but in Jeori it assimilated the other way, to ks / kk.

[Glenn]

...Incidentally, Mark, deeply impressed though I am by your updating of Wedei and its descendants , I have to note that your beautiful map almost entirely obscures the top portion of the text (on my screen, anyway).

p@,
Glenn

[zompist]

...Incidentally, Mark, deeply impressed though I am by your updating of Wedei and its descendants , I have to note that your beautiful map almost entirely obscures the top portion of the text (on my screen, anyway).

I'm not quite sure what you mean. It's just 733 pixels wide; surely you don't have some sort of archaic retrocomputing device that can't handle that? What operating system and browser are you using? Mac IE can handle even a browser window narrower than the map (the text just appears beneath it).

[Whimemsz]

*drools* Yes! Bwahahahahahaha....gimme!

Err...yes.

One question. How is Wede:i <r> pronounced exactly?

[insumaro]

It did that to me, too, Glenn. My problem was that I had to change my Screen Area from 800 by 600 pixels to 1024 by768 pixles.

(To do this in Windows, just right click on the desktop and click properties and then click on the Settings tab...then use the little slide bar to adjust the screen size)


And a question: Zomp, aren't those letters such as ng and ? with tilde renderable in Unicode?

[Glenn]

It did that to me, too, Glenn. My problem was that I had to change my Screen Area from 800 by 600 pixels to 1024 by768 pixles.

(To do this in Windows, just right click on the desktop and click properties and then click on the Settings tab...then use the little slide bar to adjust the screen size)

It worked; thanks! (I'll change it back, however, since the text is now a bit small to read, especially for my parents.)

p@,
Glenn

[zompist]

It did that to me, too, Glenn. My problem was that I had to change my Screen Area from 800 by 600 pixels to 1024 by768 pixles.

800x600?! That's the dark (or more precisely the cramped) ages, man!

My monitor at home is 1680x1050, but I'm a freak for big screens. For writing or artwork, the more you can see the better.

And a question: Zomp, aren't those letters such as ng and ? with tilde renderable in Unicode?

Yes, if you have a Unicode font that contains them. The problem is that Unicode on IE, the most popular browser, does not degrade nicely. It doesn't replace characters it can't render with something recognizable; it displays a box or a question mark.

[con quesa]

The page looks very nice. However, everything after the "Numbers" sectoin is bolded. Forget to close a bold tag, Zomp?

[zompist]

The page looks very nice. However, everything after the "Numbers" sectoin is bolded. Forget to close a bold tag, Zomp?

Looked fine for me-- what browser/OS are you using? I did just make a minor change there; see if that fixes it for you.

[con quesa]

I use Opera version 7.23, but the text looks normal again.

[Rory]

Last night I read over the grammar, and wrote my li'l notes and questions for posting today. These only refer to Wed&#275;i.

Transcription! A:rgh! Why not use acutes or macrons?
Some grammatic errors in the document: referring to Wed&#275;i in both past and present tenses, and a few "is"s where there should have been "are"s.
Does this "fist & fingers" number system mean that when Xengi peasants sign numbers to each other meaning "one more" than to we are used to (i.e. they hold up 2 fingers for 3)?
What differentiates <ii> from <i:>? Is the former /i?i/ whereas the latter /i:/?
I am a bit disappointed at lack of full orthographical information, but it doesn't bother me too much.

[insumaro]

I'd have to say that I agree with Rory on the colons. They just aren't too ?sthetically pleasing. Of course, I don't particularly like macrons, either.

Wede:i Wedeei Wed?i Wed?i Wed?i


Hmmmm


::remembers that it's not his conlang::


I really like the daughter languages. They do a good job capturing the Wede:i flavor while retaining their own neat perks. (Nasalization, ? and ?, tones, muahahah!)

[Glenn]

I would like to cast my vote for representing the long vowels with macrons, as in Cuezi; however, I understand if there are font and/or browser restrictions that prevent this.

Overall, neat stuff!

p@,
Glenn

[Space Dracula]

I use Opera version 7.23, but the text looks normal again.

Whoa, me too! Well, with a few customizations.

[Glenn]

Does this "fist & fingers" number system mean that when Xengi peasants sign numbers to each other meaning "one more" than to we are used to (i.e. they hold up 2 fingers for 3)?

I believe that this is indeed the case; I've been thinking about similar issues for my Kiarloni people, who use a duodecimal (base 12) number system.

p@,
Glenn

[zompist]

Transcription! A:rgh! Why not use acutes or macrons?

Sorry, colons are the longstanding practice (8 years) of Wede:iologists.

I purposely use different transcription systems, in imitation of terrestrial linguistics.

I'll look for the errors you mention.

Does this "fist & fingers" number system mean that when Xengi peasants sign numbers to each other meaning "one more" than to we are used to (i.e. they hold up 2 fingers for 3)?

Yes indeed. If you venture into a Xurnese bar and hold up one finger, you'll get two beers.

What differentiates <ii> from <i:>? Is the former /i?i/ whereas the latter /i:/?

Phonetically, nothing at all. Where you see ii, there's a morpheme boundary in between; e.g. liingokze = li + ing + ok + ze. A long vowel (as in Bi:dau) is always part of a single morpheme.

I am a bit disappointed at lack of full orthographical information, but it doesn't bother me too much.

Do you mean, full details on the logographic writing system? Well, someday I'd like to provide that-- not many people have created a whole one, I think. The full system needs 1095 glyphs, of which I've worked out about 135. (I worked out those needed for all the syllables of Axunashin.)

[zmeiat_joro]

Actually I find colons look better better than diactrics. The only thing that botherred me with them is on the map, the inscription "G O : R T U", I think "G O: R T U" would look better.

[Neon Fox]

EDIT: and you put Jeerio up! Even better! Oh, and what does 'inexorable' mean? :oops:

"Unable to be stopped"

Try though he might, he could not resist the inexorable rush of floodwater.

--Neon Fox

[So Haleza Grise]

There appear to be some We:dei cities in Easterner territory; are these trading outposts or something?

Ooh, and while I'm at it, a few more questions:

Do you envision giving Cuolese and Jeori each their own seperate pages in the future?

Jeori is now a dead language, not spoken as a native tongue anywhere, is this correct? Or are there still isolated pockets where it exists?

How widespread is the knowledge of modern Jeori (I suppose I'm really asking a question about the Tasuc Tei education system)? Is it a requirement for any kind of professional life, or can most people, outside of maybe state officials and bureaucrats, get by without it?

On a morphological/syntatic note, it was perhaps surprising to see that both We:dei descendent branches maintained both their accusative and dative cases under pressure from Xurnese, which, as I understand it, has a pragmatics-based case system. Does the "free word order" rule from We:dei still apply? Is topicalisation used as a word order feature?