Cassowaries Rant

People have complained

Someone has complained that I don’t write enough here. You may blame this on him.

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, John Cowan wrote:
I got a spam with a subject line of "Set up ywm fegghig". Now plainly
Ywm Fegghig is the name of a conlang; what conlang is it?

Clearly pronounced /win fEdZi/, it is the new form of Lam Fegghig (Old Fegghig), and in dire need of a spelling reform.

In Lam Fegghig, ywm, ‘clean’, was pronounced /yu:m/, but a series ofsound changes (turning the y into a semivowel, velarisation before the velar vowel, followed by fronting and subsequent derounding; finally, the distinction of length was replaced by one of tenseness). The change of from /m/ to /n/ actually represents a change of phonemics, but phonetically it’s still [m]. In Ywm Fegghig, ywm means ‘new’.

In Lam Fegghig, there was already a tendency to palatise non-geminate velars in palatal areas, so it was not uncommon to see a h placed after the geminate velars. Later, the palatalisation spread throughout, though attacked geminate /gg/ different from non-geminate /g/. /ij/ eventually simplified into /i:/ and then /i/.

The language is spoken on Crange /krAJ/, a planet populated by aliens with a ruling elite consisting of Welshmen who fell through a wormhole at just the right time to take advantage of the coup and the fact that this planet is almost exactly like earth, except that it’s populated by aliens and ruled by Welshmen. Somehow they managed to remain dominant these past 800 years (which is about 1100 earth years). These days, though, they’ve allowed much of the remote northern hemisphere to rule themselves, and they’ve formed a relatively eco-anarcho-socialist society. For much of the rest of the northern hemisphere, they’re content to have a rule something like Mrs Windsor’s in Australia (i.e. they don’t care what people do in their name, but they’re not necessarily democratic). The much more habitable south, though, is still under an authoritarian regime.

(Ywm Fegghig is spoken in the northern hemisphere.)