Phonological musings (was: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton")

On Monday, October 4, 2004, at 08:11 , Roger Mills wrote:

> Christian Thalmann wrote:
>> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@A...> wrote:
>>
>> Oh, one more thing...  "buy" is actually pronounced [baI],
>> not [buI].  If you need an English example of [uI], better
>> use "ruin".
>>
> Hmm, that's usually ['ru(w)@n] in all but the most careful (US)
> pronunciation; British/RP may well vary.
In RP its ['ru.In] - that's the pronunciation I was brought up with. IME
all pronunciations are disyllabic.

> Given the knowledge of everyone in this group, especially Our Lord of the
> I., I won't _bet_ that there's no diphthongal [uj] in English, but every
> ex.
> I can think of is 2 syllables-- "Louie" "chewy" "buoy" and "hooey, fooey"
> come closest.
Same here. I am not aware of any English dialect that has [uj] - but as
English is spoken over such wide areas, I would hesitate to say it never
occurs - but it must be rare.

It does occur in Britain, however, in Welsh - for example: llwyd [Kujd]
(grey/gray), wyth [ujT] (eight), wy [uj] (egg) etc. When anglophones
encounter it in proper names like Clwyd [k_hlujd] they invariably
pronounce it either as English sound in _boy_, i.e. [k_hlQjd] or as two
syllables ['k_hlu.Id] - except in the name Myfanwy [m@'vanuj] where
anglophones invariably pronounce the final syllable as [nwi].

[snip]
> Immediate diversion away from YAEPT:
> Interestingly, Proto-Austronesian had both *-iw and *-uy (= -uj) in final
> position; both quite rare, and often treated irregularly in descendants.
Interesting - both those sounds occur in Welsh. Indeed, [iw] or [Iw] is
the sound given to standard Eng. /ju/ in the 'Welsh English' (also _ruin_
is pronounced [rIw.In] there  :)

While I have no difficulty at all in pronouncing [iw], I do find [uj]
difficult. Thus it has long puzzled me why [uj] seems to find favor among
some auxlangers - but we'll leave that to them!

But on the pronunciation page of the Choton website, the phonetic
transcriptions and examples suggest that Choton |ui| is pronounced [u.I],
which makes me wonder why it's listed. Or does Pascal intend it to be the
diphthong in Welsh _Clwyd_, that is Esperanto's /uj/?

I notice that Choton has resurrected Volapük's 'umlauted vowels'. Indeed,
the phonology seems quite challenging. If I had been persuaded to accept a
phonology half as difficult, I think BrSc would've been polished off long
ago  ;)

==============================================================
On Monday, October 4, 2004, at 01:08 , Pascal A. Kramm wrote:
[snip]
> Now this isn't your run-of-the-mill romance auxlang (which has been done
> to
> death already), but rather it is based upon English (as the most used
> natural language for international communication), German (as the
> second-most important Germanic language) and Japanese (since East-Asian
> languages are generally completely ignored by auxlangs, with Japanese
> being
> the most important there,
Not sure the Chinese would entirely agree with the last claim! But even so
- I find no Japanese influence in the phonology. Indeed, I think most
Japanese would have considerable difficulties with it.

Basically I think the phonology needs more work; in particular, I would
suggest a serious consideration of Japanese phonology. This is meant to be
a helpful suggestion.

==============================================================
(Thinks: how did this get into the 'Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"'
thread? Well, it did, and as it's to do with phonology, I can include it
here).

On Tuesday, October 5, 2004, at 03:31 , Trebor Jung wrote:
> Christian írta: "Brin and brun used to be pronounced as [bRE~] and [bR9~]
> ,
> respectively.  As Christophe would be happy to tell you if he were still
> on
> the list, that phonemic pair has been lost in the course of the last
> century. Nowadays, they are both pronounced [bRE~], so don't feel
> compelled
> to hear a difference just because the spelling would suggest so."
>
> The French I learned distinguishes [E~] and [9~]. How about other L2
> Francophones?
Yes, I was taught to pronounce _brin_ as [bRE~] and _brun_ as [bR9~] way
back in the 1950s, and I believe they were still widely pronounce that way
south of La Manche at that time.

But it seems that in the past half century, /9~/ has become unrounded and
is now generally pronounced as [E~]. The information I have from people
like Christophe, my wife who teaches the language & speaks it fluently, my
daughter-in-law who is 100% French and others is that the pronunciation of
both _brun_ and _brin_ as [bRE~] is now practically universal. My
daughter-in-law tells me that some (note: not all) of her teachers did try
to get pupils to distinguish between [E~] and [9~] when she was at school,
  but that no one does    :-)

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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