Re: NATLANG: Scary Document
| From: | BP Jonsson <bpj@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 9, 2003, 10:30 |
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At 22:22 8.4.2003 -0400, Herman Miller wrote:
>On Tue, 8 Apr 2003 15:55:58 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> >More on-topic, on of the more attractive features linguistically of the
> good ol'
> >and thankfully dead Soviet Union was the prevalence of officialese
> abbrevs made
> >of the first bits of the constituent words, eg _Sovnarkom_, _SmerSh_,
> _GULag_.
> >Unfortunately, I've not managed to force similar habits on any of my
> conlangs.
> >Is anyone doing so for his/her conlang?
>
>Actually, I've been considering that for borrowings of English phrases in
>Lindiga, for foreign concepts like "political correctness" (polkor) and
>"intellectual property" (inteprop).
I haven't tried it for my conlangs, yet, though it is a nice idea. Tibetan
uses this technique of taking the first syllable of each words in a phrase,
turning it into an "acrosyllabic compound" (a term I just made upon the
spot :-)
so that _Pandrita chenpo_ becomes _Panchen_, _Drölma karpo_ becomes _Drölkar_,
_Ngagki wangpo_ becomes _Ngawang_ (the last incidentally my Tibetan name :-)
/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)
--
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No man forgets his original trade: the rights of
nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar,
if grammarians discuss them.
-Dr. Samuel Johnson (1707 - 1784)
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