Re: VMs: Newbie's two cents worth

["Larry Roux" <lroux@xxxxxxx>]

Actually, there is a long line of people creating not only personal
alphabets, but languages as well.

Not only is it a study in linguistics, but a lot of fun too!  One often
quoted example is JRR Tolkien who created several languages/scripts. 
Tolkien was a linguist and playing around with words was his love and
joy.  Most people do not realize that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy came
out of his exploration of his created "Sindarin" and "Quenyan"
languages, not the other way around.  He was exploring what languages
may have been the basis for the extant languages found today.  Quenyan
was proto-romantic.

I also created my own language and alphabet in high school.  One example
I remember is "baenair adi saghan", meaning "The world for your love". 
I even invented a whole cultural background for the language where the
above sentence could mean, variably, "I would give the entire world just
to have your love" or it could be used as a term of exasperation.  The
language actually had a pretty involved structure - borrowed from such
languages as Russian, French, and others. 

O delorian,
ab rond ak karu!

There are also those who create variants on the "modern" language of
their time to simplify rules to a more cohesive structure.

I mean, look at modern American English!  What a mess!  With words
borrowed from every language under the sun, and evolution of
pronounciation the rules have become unbearable.  While "knight" was
once pronounced pretty close to how it is spelled we might as well write
it Nite nowdays.  Better yet, get rid of the silent e and spell it nit
with the i with the bar over it.

And why have ough be "o" in "though" but "ff" in tough?  Why not have a
single letter for "th" or "sh" sounds? It is questions like this that
make people go "I can do this better!".  

Oh, and did I mention that it is just plain fun to create your own
alphabet/language?




******************************
Larry Roux
Syracuse University
lroux@xxxxxxx
*******************************
>>> jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 02/15/03 12:45 PM >>>
2/15/03 11:31:22 AM, "Petr Kazil" <kazil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Let's make this hypothesis even weirder and speculate that some traces
of the 
Etruscan language
>survived in some mountain valleys into the late 1300's :-)

I have a book on Etruscan grammar, and it cannot be Etruscan


>But I wonder why anyone - who was supposedly literate - would invent
his own 
alphabet.

I made my own in first year of primary school, a few weeks after 
I started learning how to read. Think of it as a single-substitution
cipher. Later I discovered the Russian alphabet and, for a while,
I kept notes in French phonetically written in Cyrillic letters.




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