Re: Un-phonetic conlang

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

James (Campbell):
> Quoted From: And Rosta
> > Josh Brandt-Young <neonwave7@JUNO.COM> asks:
> > >      I've suddenly gotten the inspiration for a conlang that's written
> > > with a non-phonetic alphabet (rather like English). I'm not sure why, I
> > > think it's an effort to produce a conlang that's as irregular as
> > > possible.
> > [...]
> > >      This is an idea that never even occurred to me before. Is anyone
> > > else doing anything like this?
> >
> > Leo Marshall's Namyuan (nowadays pronounced [DOw~Z]) has the most
> > irregular unphonetical orthography of any conlang that I know. <snip>
>
> This discussion (from about 3 weeks ago) prompted me to rethink certain
> parts of Rahha. I had already been worrying that the way it sounded, and
> the way it looked in Latin transcription, seemed a little dull - childish,
> even. Without changing the alphabet (cos I did like that bit), I've tweaked
> the orthography and pronunciation a bit to introduce some irregularities
> and add some flavour. The result has cheered me up no end about the
> project. Thanks for the inspiration/nudge.

Thanks for the thanks.

I probably said it in the message you quote, but the reason that
Namyuan is like this is that it is constantly evolving and has
been in existence a long time (just a little longer than my
own Livagian, whose evolution has been much more catastrophistical).

Since experience shows that it is possible to spend years and
years incrementally creating a single language, I find that this
is one of the things that I look for in a conlang: I prefer those
languages that live with their inventors always, to be tinkered
at and endlessly embellished, rather than those that are sketched
and tossed off [not in the impudibund sense of that idiom]. For
example, while I have not yet become enchanted with Aluric, I
am enchanted by the way it is so much part of Tony's life and
soul.

> BTW, is there any Namyuan online?

Alas no. Its inventor does not even own a computer, despite years
of proselytizing by me. However, I did some more Namyuan fieldwork
in October when a Namyuan speaker came to stay with us for the
weekend. As a result of this, I am planning to at least produce
a document on Namyuan script. It can then be submitted to the
Conscript Unicode Registry, and anyone who wants to put the
document on-line (perhaps as gifs or jpgs) will gladly be permitted
to do so.

I might add that, much as Tony has reported is/was the case
with him & Aluric, the inventor of Namyuan tends to *know*
the language more than *know about* the language. So neither
he nor I can currently say, for example, how many phonemes
there are. (For an earlier stage of the language I did know:
when a first year undergraduate, I submitted an essay on a
generative phonology formalization of sandhi rules in Sanskrit
and Ajitolujan [as Namyuan then was]. For this essay I was
given the lowest possible mark short of an outright fail, though
I perceive that this was motivated by the bemusement of the
marker rather than by any worthlessness of the essay or its
object of study.)

Anyway, enough anecdotling.

--And