On 14/06/2011 21:37, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> On Tuesday 14 June 2011 21:17:52, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> is important. People expect Greek to be written in
>> Greek; they have also, through a millennium and more of
>> writing, copying&  printing ancient Greek, come to
>> expect those darn diacritics   :)
>
> Yes.  The Greek alphabet is an icon of Greekness
> instantly recognizable to any educated westerner.

Indeed - the Greeks still cling onto their alphabet and
have resisted all attempts at Romanization.

> Indeed, it doesn't linguistically make a difference in
> which script the language is written (the oldest Greek we
> know is *not* written in any version of the Greek
> alphabet!);

   :)

Mycenaean Greek without inflexions - now there's a thought!
But I guess linear B fonts are not common    ;)

On Cyprus Greek continued to be written in a syllabary until
the 4th century BCE.

But, enough - I'm sticking with the Greek alphabet.

> yet, one would expect from a "Greek without
> inflections" that it is written in Greek letters (by the
> "Peanoan spirit" without diacritics, but one could just

I think the "Peanoan spirit" needs to be treated with
caution.  He was attempting to create yet another auxlang -
I am not. This is essentially an exercise in producing
"Greek without inflexions" just for the sake of doing so.

> as legitimately say that the diacritics are part and
> parcel of Ancient Greek orthography).

I still have not reached a final decision on the diacritics.
But I looked again at what I wrote and the "rules" are not
as complicated as I had remembered. But I'm waiting to see
if either of the two Philips respond to the bit of Simonides
I wrote without accents last evening    :)

>> I got a bit carried away yesterday, almost as if I was
>> creating an auxlang!!! If I want TAKE to be _perceived_
>> as "ancient Greek without inflexions" then may be it
>> had better look like what ancient Greek is generally
>> expected to look like.
>
> Hmmmmmmm ... surely, the accents aren't *inflections*,
> so a "Greek without inflections" would still have them,
> unless it is a "Greek without inflections and accents".

Good point!

[snip]
>> Yes, and also in keeping with the way that _ancient
>> Greek_ is still traditionally printed.  Katharevousa,
>> when all's said and done, a comparatively modern
>> conlang    ;)
>
> Sure.  And does anybody still use it?

Apparently so. I understand there's still a newspaper that
uses it.
[snip]
>
> The breathing mark on initial rho is, to my knowledge,
> non-distinctive, and only serves to indicate the initial
> rho was pronounced differently (voiceless? aspirated?)

Correct - and among those cities that had a separate symbol
for /h/ we find occasional spellings _hr_ or _rh_.  The
Romans always transcribed initial rho as _rh_.  I imagine it
was pronounced like _rh_ in modern Welsh which is a
_simultaneous_ pronouncing of [h] with a trilled [r]. We
debated more than once in the past on this list whether the
welsh sound is "voiceless [r] with aspiration being a
secondary effect" or "an aspirated [r] with devoicing as a
secondary effect"    :)

[snip]
[snip]
>> We will not have vowel length.
>
> How do you have Ancient Greek accentuation without vowel
> length?  Does that work?

It doesn't, of course. But as TAKE does not have inflexions,
one will not have the problem with what to do with the
accent in the different inflected forms. As it stands at
the moment, the accent marks stress and whether it is
acute or circumflex is learnt with the word. As BPJ pointed
out, it is rather like learning whether [ɛ:] is written _è_
or _ê_ in French.

>> [...]
>>
>> The rules for deriving TAKE nouns, adjectives&  verbs
>> assume one is using a standard dictionary, so one could
>> see the accent.  But yes, to predict accurately, one
>> needs to know the ancient quantities. But with a
>> dictionary you just look and follow the rules for
>> derivation.
>
> Sure.
>
>> Yuck - I always knew _ancient Greek without inflexions_
>> was not going to be easy.     :(
>
> Indeed not.  Ancient Greek is a very complex language -
> Latin looks almost like Esperanto in comparison ;)

Too true!

I once wrote a Prolog program that could accurately parse
any Latin verb form that was thrown at it if it knew the 
principal parts of the verb. It is not very difficult. I
began to modify the thing to cope with French, but all the
irregular present tense forms proved awkward and I abandoned
the project - as for writing a similar program for ancient 
Greek  ....!!

[snip]
>>
>> Darn it!  Now I'm having second thoughts about those
>> accents!
>
> I'd still drop them, but it is *your* conlang, so do
> what feels "right" to you.

There's the rub. I'm not sure what does feel "right" to
me   ;)

>> [...] But you're right of course. The Byzantine
>> accentuation does require a theoretical knowledge of
>> ancient long and short vowels. If I follow the
>> Katharevousa route then TAKE becomes basically
>> _Katharevousa without inflexions_ which ain't what I
>> wanted     :(
>
> Sure.  Would that make TAKE without accents "Dhimotiki
> without inflections"?

No - in any case Philip Newton's _Akļiteļiņika_ is
"Dhimotiki without inflexions", see:
http://gsf.mizinamo.org/

TAKE is _ancient_ Greek without inflexions.


>> =====================================================
>>
>> On 14/06/2011 14:36, BPJ wrote: [...]
>>
>>> I don't think Ray ever said that TAKE must be "spell
>>> as you speak".
>>
>> True - it ain't an auxlang.
>
> Of course not!  I know very well (and I think BPJ does,
> too) that you don't have the least intention to make yet
> another auxlang!
>
> And if TAKE is not an auxlang, the considerations of
> Peano are not really relevant, unless one wants to make a
> 1:1 analogue of LSF, but that probably doesn't work out
> very well anyway.

It doesn't. For one thing, LSF is _not_ Latin without any
inflexions - it does retain a few. I intend to retain
_none_.  TAKE will do "what it says on the tin"    :)

-- 
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]