Re: Phoneme system for my still-unnamed "Language X"

Hello!

First of all, I'd like to apologize for (yet again) sending E-mails to
the list that have my address under "Reply-To". Every time I think
I've found a trick to prevent GMail from doing this, it works for a
while and then the Reply-Tos return... :-(

On 9/6/05, Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> wrote:
> On Mon, 05 September 2005, 14:56 CEST, Julia Simon wrote
>
>  > Hello!
>
> Hallo!
>
>  > So, here's what I have now. It's lengthy, but I hope
>  > someone will find
>  > it interesting... ;-)
>
> Let's have a look... forgive me stupid mistakes, since I'm
> listening to Farin Urlaub's new solo album right now that
> I've bought just today. *sings along*
New solo album? I wasn't even aware of any *old* solo albums of his...
<turns a lovely shade of green with envy>

>  > <a> [A] (cardinal vowel #5: open, back, unrounded)
>  > [snip]
>  > <y> [@] (mid central vowel, a.k.a. "schwa")
>
> Yummy, the cardinal vowels! :) You use <y> for [@]. Hm.
I stole that particular letter from the Chukchi language... well, sort
of... Since the Chukchi live at the far end of Siberia, they use
Cyrillic letters, so they don't use <y> but <ы> (in case it gets lost
in the mail: Cyrillic letter yeru, Unicode 044B) for their /@/ sound.
I've always liked this idea -- you don't have to resort to diacritics
to write that sound, but you get to use an actual letter instead of,
say, the apostrophe. :-)

>  > There are no semivowels or non-syllabic vowels. (There are
>  > a few glides,
>
> I hope no stereotypical Sindarin clone? :-P
I hope not. I'm not very familiar with Sindarin, so it's difficult for
me to recognize and eliminate accidental similarities. ;-)

(On the up side, this means that I couldn't design a stereotypical
Sindarin clone even if I tried.)

[snip snip]

>  > There are the following consonant phonemes:
>  >
>  > voiceless aspirated plosives p_h, t_h, c_h, k_h
>
> Phew, no distinction between [p] and [p_h] as I first
> thought when looking over this mail.
Maybe in a later creation...

I didn't expect anyone to be *relieved* at the sight of my consonants,
by the way. I'd have thought that the horrors of ejectives would be
far worse than the minor discomfort of unaspirated voiceless
plosives... ;-)

>  > [snip]
>  > approximants/glides w, r\, j, M\
>
> [M\]? *goes figuring* Oh.
Yes, I wouldn't have known that one by heart either. Fortunately I
have found a nice CXS table by now. (I feel a little embarrassed,
though, because I didn't even know the IPA character for that one by
heart. That exam for which I learned the entire IPA by heart was a
*long* time ago...)

[snip]

>  > (No decision reached on consonant graphemes yet. Sorry.)
>
> Why not p t c k p· t· c· k· b d gj g w r j rj ng n l hl?
> Just a suggestion. Though evil allophones stuff like in
> French wouldn't be bad either ... I'm curious what you'll
> do.
Me too. ;-) I'll have to come up with some sort of romanization at
some point. Even if I do decide to use one of my non-roman systems as
a "native" script, I'll need some sort of ASCIIfication...

>  > 2. Sandhi rules
>  >
>  > 2.1. Vowel changes and variations
>  >
>  > In most cases, at least one of two adjacent vowels will
>  > assimilate to
>  > the other in some way. Generally speaking, <a> and <y> are
>  > the least
>  > stable vowels and <i> and <u> are the most stable ones.
>  > Often, a glide
>  > will pop up between two vowels; adjacent identical vowel
>  > phonemes are
>  > nearly always separated by a glide. (Note the difference
>  > between a
>  > sequence of two phonemic /@/s -- pronounced [@M\@] -- and
>  > a sequence
>  > of two [@]s, one of which is actually an assimilated
>  > /A/ -- pronounced
>  > [@.@], i.e. as two separate syllables but without a glide
>  > between them.)
>
> Sounds interesting.
What can I say -- the results of a long, boring bus ride, made even
longer and boring-er by a traffic jam. ;-)

>  > [snipped a lot of interesting stuff]
... same here...

> Sounds like fun. So lots of allophones. Please don't forget
> to give CXS when you give examples as well ... I hope you're
> not going to make a *phonetic* orthography, it'd be insane
> I'm sure.
Well, for the moment I'm leaning towards phonemic spelling, if only to
make sure that I don't accidentally use (for example) weak-grade
consonants at the onset of an open syllable, or the wrong kind of
vowel-lateral-vowel combination... On the other hand, I'll probably
have to use CXS (or IPA in my handwritten notes) at the same time,
because otherwise I wouldn't know how to pronounce my own words. ;-)
(I hope I'll remember all the sandhi rules eventually, but until then,
writing everything twice -- once as phonemes, once as phones -- is the
only way to go. Also, if I do decide to go with a phonemic
orthography, I'll have to give the pronunciation for everything anyway
because I don't want to be one of those nasty writers who deliberately
create obstacles for their readers... I have a class on Usability and
one on User-Centered Design coming up, and I want to be able to go
there with a clean conscience. ;)

> I'm curious what it'll be like when it's ready!!
Er... so am I. ;-)

> Viele Grüße,
Gruß zurück (and also szczęśliwej podróży for your Gdansk trip -- I
hope the exotic Polish characters make it through the mail server)!

Regards,
Julia
(who can't even say "do you speak English?" in Polish but fortunately
 has a Polish coworker who's willing to answer the occasional
 language-related question)

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)