Friday, June 19, 2009

pattern of foreign loan-word change from English to Japanese

Office lechery, which had been socially acceptable, became stigmatized as seku hara, or sexual harassment.

Japanese travelling abroad will regularly request kōhii in a restaurant, imagining that they are using an English word. The English spelling 'coffee' ...

D: a language with fewer phonemes and simpler word formation rules will do this.
Unable to hear the foreign sounds, the speaker will puzzle a native speaker.
Of course, Anglos do the same thing to Japanese regarding gemination.
One ex-waitress at the club I work at proudly boasted of her fluency, yet did knot even KNOW about gemination. Of course, she was a twit.

I refer to LangX and Lang53. There is a one-way-only direction for speech elements that is widely palatable.
One can decrease phonemes, but not increase them.
One cannot add complex consonant clusters.
Nor more variable word-position consonant rules.
Nor lexical pitch such as Mandarin uses.
Nor infixes.

A first childhood language CAN be highly complex and still be fairly easy to learn.
See Turkish infixes.
BUT being highly irregular, with many exceptions is the bane of childhood literacy.

I think using a scoring system for various languages (and their writing systems) would agree with observed literacy levels in childhood.

----
D: I tried to explain to my friend Silvia how to say the subject "big men" in Esperanto.
After about five minutes of gradually introducing infixes with forced agreement, her eyes glazed over. <:

grand- vir-
grand-a vir-o
grand-a viro-oj
grand-ay viro-oy
grand-ay viro-o-y-n
Finally grand-a-y-n vir-o-y-n.
That is right- after choosing the root/stems, there are SIX steps.
Just to say "... big men".
(D: oops, I confused J and Y.)

D: you know, if one removes forced agreement between grammatical elements, and then adds rigid word order in lieu of infixes denoting grammatical elements, then about half of my objections to Espo go away.
And it ends up looking fairly similar to some LangX-inspired creoles, though with more complex phoneme combinations.

Contrast with rigid word order, in this case SVO.
... O.
grand vir.
Plural: either grand vir-ez OR, say, xie/some/plus grand vir.
Rigid word order would even allow dual/more plural to be recycled for more/most comparative/superlative.
More, most, less, least. Plus/minus one/two. All/none- three?
Somewhat, very, totally.
A simple cypher, based on single-digit Decimese naming conventions, will suffice.
Anywhere there is a hierarchy or a continuum, a numerical basis makes sense.
Differentiating between qualitative and quantitative adds flexibility.
Before numbers, the ancient Greeks used letters for numbers.
I'm just reintroducing that with a twist! <:

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