(no subject)

[sanura]

Mm. I picked up the Wednesday night midnight-6am shift on Copy at the Thresher. I picked a magnolia on the way back across campus last night. I forgot to put it in water, though, so now it's kind of brown. Still smells like heaven, though. I was too sleepy. I figured it would be all right, since all I have on Thursdays is Diction at 9:25. It will be very hard to get up, but then I can go back to sleep again. If I do. I might.

Speaking of my Diction class, um. Well, I like the teacher. He's a very good bass-baritone grad student named Rick Piersall. However, he has the misfortune of not being an absolutely infallible expert on controversial linguistic issues, which is imperative when you have me in your class. We did glides and combined consonants today, and I am absolutely convinced the [h] at the beginning of the combined consonant [hw], especially in the English word "who" (which I would much rather IPA [hu] than [hwu], anyway, but that's a different issue), cannot possibly be the same IPA consonant as in the English word "huge" or even "he". Rick spelled "huge" with a [hj] and said when I asked that there was no [ç] in English diction, only in other languages, but there must be! At least the way some people (like me) say Houston. Also. If it's not a [ç], it must be because the [j] glide is flavoring the [h] aspirate, and not because "IPA is meant to represent all the languages in one orthography, so it's going to have some approximations or inaccuracies." It's not that I don't like him as a teacher, he just frustrates me because he is not omniscient.

Amspisali is way cooler than English, anyway. We paired all the voiced and unvoiced stops and fricatives in English, and I am so mad there aren't any unvoiced laterals or nasals in English. Welsh rules the world for its unvoiced l. Lhhhhhhh! Llewellyn is never pronounced Welshly, but it's so much more fun! Amspisali has unvoiced nasals, too. It's impossible to distinguish between unvoiced m and n, since they're both just blowing through your nose, but wouldn't it be cool if you could? Maybe if you always had to squush your nose down for an m. There is a voiced consonant for every unvoiced consonant in Amspisali, too. Like voiced [ç] and [x] (are there IPA symbols for that?), which are kind of babbling gurgly baby noises. Fricative g's. Gggggghhh. But they're consonants, and slightly different from each other, so why not use them?

Vowels, on the other hand, in Amspisali... eh. I can do without most of the r-flavored midvowels like r-epsilon and r-schwa. I can leave out most of the variations between umlauty vowels, too. One is enough for Amspisali. And they don't differentiate between dark and bright "a". There should be three kinds of e, though. There's one in between broad Californian open e and German superuberspiffyclosedclosed e that's past [I] and almost [i]. But I don't know it, so for now (since I'm working on orthography rather than vocabulary for Amspisali), there are only two kinds of e.

I'll stop now, since I'm probably scaring people.

Comments

[music-dissident.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful. Your approach to creating a language is completely different from what mine would be.

[sanura.livejournal.com]

Well, the approach I started with for Ailurian, as opposed to Amspisali, was completely different from this. For Ailurian (the language of Alaiah), I wrote a bunch of poems from the Catian culture and then translated them word by suddenly-existing word into Ailurian, which I made up to fit the culture and also largely to meet the syllabic and metric needs of the poem. As good a way to come up with irregular forms as any, I say. The character set I invented in middle school with the intention it should look descended vaguely from Latinate characters.

[music-dissident.livejournal.com]

If I were to devise a unique language it would probably involve the invention of a coinciding culture, geography, and history, multiple ancestor languages, multiple dialects . . . in other words, I would work far too much.

[sanura.livejournal.com]

Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean I didn't do all that work. The geography, culture, history, multiple ancestor languages and pictures of a set of idol figurines that illustrate the mythology are all up somewhere on my angelfire site. The big dragon cup with my hoard in it is a major facet of the ceremonial culture. Believe me, I did way too much work, and all the little experiments I do with phonemic interests have to coincide with the background. Dialects I have managed to avoid (aside from accents and minor subdialects) because the continent everybody lives on is relatively small. I haven't adressed the languages across the ocean at all yet. That's my next project.