Re: New/revised language: Phonology

on 18/12/01 11:23, Thomas R. Wier (trwier@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU) wrote:

> Quoting Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 10:10:10 -0600, Andrew Chaney <adchaney@...>
>> wrote:
>>> stops:       p /p/   t /t/   c /k/
>>> fricatives:  f /f/   s (1)   x /T/
>>> liquids,etc: w /w/   j /j/   r (2)
>>> nasals:      m /m/   n (3)
>>
>> If you don't confine yourself to ASCII, þ /T/ would look more
>> traditional ;)
>
> Agreed, especially since [x] and [T] are so different
> acoustically.
>
An eth or thorn is notoriously hard to produce on a mac. At least it is in
OS9. x serves no other purpose in the orthography (personally, i've always
felt x was an exceedingly pointless letter but that's just personal bias) so
i figured i'd put it to good use.

>>> 0. Most consonents have voiced allophones.
>>> 1. /s/ or /S/
>>> 2. r or l
>>> 3. /n/ or /N/
>
> Are there environments for these alternations? Does voicing
> occur, for example, intervocalically?
There are but I'm not sure what the exact conditions are. Intervocally will
almost certainly be one factor inducing voicing.

>>> a /a/
>>> [snip]
>>> y /y/
>
> Ah. So, basically, the vowels of English, plus [y].
>
I was tired of working with an a,e,i,o,u 5-way distinction so it's every
vowel I could think of at the time off the top of my head and easily
produce/pronounce. So, yeah, mostly English with /y/. Too many of my sources
on other languages are written; so it's hard for me get a good feel for
vowels in languages other than English.

>> Why not use one and the same diacritic everywhere? /e/ could be {ê}.
I was trying to avoid suggesting a systematic distinction along lines of
tenseness or length or other feature. I was trying to avoid implying
distinctions that are not made (at least not consciously) by the language's
speakers.

The romanization pretty is pretty much random and unsatisfactory but I am
limited by the rather small # of vowels in the roman alphabet. In the native
alphabet, there is one letter per vowel and no length, tenseness, or other
relation is perceived between the vowels. /i/ is not seen as a long /I/ or a
tense /I/ or as having any relation at all to /I/ (other than both being
vowels). Likewise /e/ and /E/, etc. Thus using variations of the letter i
for /i/ and /I/ is deceptive but, so far as i can tell, unavoidable.

That having been said, I probably will go back and rework the vowel
romanization. But I'm sticking with [x] for /T/.

Mostly, I'm just trying to nail down a phonemic inventory so that I can get
on to working on the more interesting bits.


andy.

adchaney@louisiana.edu

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