Monday, August 16, 2010

The Jamin & Karen Supper Club: Midori's Floating World Café

Actually, the title is a little misleading: I went to Midori the other night with The Sweeties, not with Karen.  They treated me to what is possibly the only sushi place in the Twin Cities that i haven't been to yet in exchange for some laptop fixin'.

I wasn't really sure what to expect from Midori's Floating World Café, but what i definitely did not expect was how overwhelmingly cute it was!  It's just adorable.

We got some tasty beef pot stickers as appetizers with our drinks, and i was very pleasantly surprised by the delicious peach sake cooler - pretty much a sake spritzer with peach syrup in it.  Very refreshing. Then came little octopus dumplings and some sort of tofu salad.  As cute as they were, i need to accept the fact that i just don't like octopus. 

For an entrée, i got the sashimi and tempura bento dinner, and it was nice enough, pretty; nothing special.  The tempura was particularly good - especially the sweet potato; the sashimi was fine but nothing to blog about... and, having just relearned my lesson for the nth time, i gave the tako to Ms. Fledermaus.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

I just killed syllabics :Þ

So I take some of that back.  I've just killed off syllabics altogether, so you can ignore the bit about them being their own letter à la icelandic and all that.

C[+sonorant,+syllabic] → C[-syllabic]a

Syllabic sonorant consonants become non-syllabic and are followed by -a.

swistr → swistra (sister)
rign → rigna (rain)

It also has some interesting implications for verbs:

dūn, stēn, gīn - no syllabics here.  But:

wisan > wisn > wisna
waírþan > werðn > werðna

Here's also a nifty twist for Class 1 weak verbs:

wiljan > wilin

Some new words and rules

I've been playing around with some new words, and by extension, new rules.  I added a rule to "Mora Loss" (which is really just a sort of catch-all bucket for about 30 other rules) to include long vowels:

V [+long]→[-long]/_______## (i.e. a long vowel becomes short at the end of a word or word segment.)

I also added an early rule which may be somewhat superfluous, as I think this already happened in Gothic, but not in the orthography:

b,d→v,ð/V_______V (i.e. intervocalic stops, not including g, become continutant.) 

I think g did this in Gothic as well, but I'm imagining something a little more interesting for g as time goes on...

I also added a bunch of new words, which are in the lexicon, mostly for the purpose of examples in the rules:

dōr n.st.n. door.
dūn v.t. to do.
fūts n.st.m. foot.
gangan v.i. to go. Also gīn.
gēts n.st.f. goat.
gīn v.i. to go. Short form of gangan.
gum n.w.m. man.  
haus n.st.n. house.
hōhs adj. high.
ja itj. yes, yea(h). 
kwīns n.st.f. woman.
lōmyna n.st.n. lightning.
man n.w.m. man, person (not gender-specific).
nī itj.  no, not.
standan v.i. to stand.  Also stēn.
stēn v.i. to stand.  Short form of standan.
þȳþs n.st.m. person.
werðan v.i. to become, to turn into.
wilen v.t. to want.
wisan v.i. to be.

I've also decided that syllabic sonorants can just sit there and be syllabic sonorants, icelandic style (e.g. sivn - "seven", unsr - "our").