Hallo conlangers!

On 25/04/2017 10:12 R A Brown wrote:

> On 24/04/2017 18:12, Gage Amonette wrote:
>>>
>>> Completely ignoring practically everything as the
>>> double dots made not the slightest difference to
>>> pronunciation. It's only for looks; I'd always assumed
>>>  to make it look 'Teutonic' (or maybe 'Gothic' which
>>> would IMO be even ridiculous)
>>
>>
>> You're right: Gothic didn't even have umlaut. :)
>>
>
> Didn't even use the Roman alphabet either   :)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_alphabet
>
> But even when the Visigoths took to using the Roman
> alphabet, they did not use double-dots to denote umlaut.

Of course not; they did not have umlaut in their language, and thus had
no need for umlaut dots!

> As
> most know this symbol was first in Hellenistic Greek to
> denote _diaeresis_ as, indeed, it still is in _naïve, Noël,
> Chloë, Zoë_.

And has nothing to do with vowel qualities.

> Its use to denote umlaut in German dates from
> the late Middle Ages when a superscript _e_ was often
> written as two dots in handwriting - nothing to do with the
> Goths  :)

Just that. A superscript _e_, which has a rather n-like appearance in
German cursive, was reduced to two vertical strokes and those to two
dots. The resemblance to Greek diaeresis is a mere coincidence.

> In Mötörhead it they are merely weird decoration with no
> phonetic value.

Yep. But Motörhead (no dots on the first _o_!) did not start it. Unless
there were some unknown antecedents (see below), it were Blue Öyster
Cult. But that doesn't really matter. The point is, these dots are just
fancy decorations without phonetic value, and the proper way of dealing
with them in an environment that doesn't allow such diacritics is to
omit them. I remember a discussion in a music-related newsgroup where a
German had spelled the band name _Hüsker Dü_ as "Huesker Due", which was
widely considered a disfiguration.

But one of the first internationally noteworthy bands with umlaut dots
in the name was a German one, Amon Düül II. Herein, _Düül_ is a made-up
nonsense word; in German, this is usually pronounced /dy:l/, i.e.
reading the dots as umlaut dots (though /y:/ is never spelled _üü_ in
German); I guess most English speakers simply ignore them. (Maybe Blue
Öyster Cult got the idea from Amon Düül II, but that is uncertain; the
former did not sound as if they were influenced by the latter much,
which does not preclude the possibility that they just saw the dots on
an album cover in a record shop and decided to use them.)

> ------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 25/04/2017 04:35, Gage Amonette wrote:
>>>
>>> Carbon and nitrogen aren't toxic, but cyanide is quite
>>>  poisonous.  It's not the elements of a language that
>>> give it complex qualities, but how they're put
>>> together.
>>
>>
>> Probably, but I would still argue that the effect that
>> those combinations exercise on the hearers is still
>> largely one of association;
>
> I agree with Gage.  It's (largely) subjective.

Right.

> [snip]
>
>>
>> Even Tolkien,  which was mentioned by someone recently on
>> this list, followed this convention (or made it up? maybe
>> not; it seems like this motif has been firmly entrenched
>> in western thought for a long time) when he created
>> Quenya and the Black Speech.
>>
>
> Tho it should be noted that Sindarin and Quenya are in many
> respect quite different.

Indeed they are; they are of quite different phonological (and
grammatical) flavour, and there are people who like one and dislike the
other, or vice versa. It is quite easy to tell which language a given
Elvish text is in.

> Tolkien AIUI wanted Quenya to be
> noble and stately, and we know from his own writings that
> his experience of the Classical languages (Latin & Greek)
> had a major influence in the development of the language, as
> did Finnish which Tolkien greatly like when he first
> encountered the language (as indeed so did I).  Quenya comes
> out of this background which is probably why I much
> preferred the language to Sindarin when I first encountered
> the LotR in my late teens more than half a century ago.

Yes. Quenya is the "Latin" of Middle-earth; at the time of the War of
the Rings, it was hardly spoken by anyone at home (even the few
remaining Noldor had shifted to Sindarin for daily matters), but it was
still used as a scholarly and ritual language. Of course, there is no
necessity that a language used for those purposes was typologically like
Latin, but this pretty much was Tolkien's idea. And, as you say, he
liked the sound of Finnish, and added some Finnish flavour to it.

> Sindarin is clearly influence by Welsh and, to a lesser
> extent, by Old English (e.g. its vowels include OE [y] which
> is not found in Welsh).  That is why the language remains a
> favorite among those to whom Insular Celtic is "mystical"   ;)

Very much so. Sindarin is indeed very similar to Welsh in its phonology
(with similar initial mutations!), but also influenced by Old English.
You mention /y/, which occurs in OE but not in Welsh. Indeed, one
publisher complained about (an early version of) the _Quenta
Silmarillion_ that it contained too many "Celtic" names that would make
it hard to follow. Of course, actually none were Celtic: a few were
Quenya, but most in the language that would eventually be named Sindarin.

> You're right that Tolkien look to languages he thought ugly
> for the Black Speech.  But this a matter of taste.

Yep. Like when I planned to compose an opera based on _The Lord of the
Rings_ (a foolish plan that I have abandoned long ago, as the thing
would have been Wagnerian in its dimensions), I was about to
characterize Sauron by a 12-tone series because I considered 12-tone
serialist music monstrously ugly.

> Interestingly Tolkien did not hold the "mystical" view of
> Insular Celtic and while he liked and was fascinated by
> Welsh, he considered the Gaelic languages to be harsh and
> ugly.

And that tells us that he had a refined and differentiated taste of
languages. Many people aren't even aware that Welsh and Gaelic are
different languages! To Tolkien, there was nothing "mystical" about
Insular Celtic languages, or anything Celtic at all; he just liked Welsh
- and disliked Gaelic.

> I disagree with him; I find the Gaelic languages,
> with their palatalization and lenition of plosives to
> fricatives, "softer" and more attractive than Welsh (and
> none of them mystical).

I like both branches of Insular Celtic, but there is nothing "mystical"
about them to me. They are just interesting and beautiful languages,
nothing more and nothing less.

> These things are clearly (to a large extent) subjective and
> IMO have a good deal to do with the experience of one's own
> L1.  I have no doubt that someone brought up speaking, say,
> a Berber language would find _nothing_ barbarous or ugly
> when encountering pharyngeal fricatives in another language,
> but s/he might well find some English consonants ugly   ;)

Certainly! It's all subjective.

> While I can appreciate that someone may put together all the
> things s/he finds harsh or ugly in order to produce a
> barbarous conlang, I get very uneasy when people label
> particular natlangs as 'barbarous'.

So do I. By the "historical" token, German and Japanese would have to be
the most "barbarous" languages, as the worst atrocities were perpetrated
in the names of these peoples, but Japanese doesn't sound harsh at all,
with hardly any closed syllables (syllable-final _n_ tends to be
realized just as nasalization of the vowel) or consonant clusters and
all that. It's utter nonsense.

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