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

Hello!

On 9/7/05, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Schnecki writes:
[snip snip]

> > As for the <y>, I wanted a "simple" yet "real" letter for /@/ (i.e. no
> > weird diacritics and no stopgap non-alphabetic characters such as the
> > apostrophe). ...
>
> I've done the same in Qthyn|gai (so there's a schwa in the first
> syllable). :-)
>
> Originally, I wrote the four vowel phonemes /a i u @/ as <a i u e>,
> but then I decided that at some time in the future, I want to use <e>
> and <o> for allophones of /i/ and /u/.  It's not implemented in Lisp
> yet, but planned.  Anyway, that's why I used <y> for /@/.
Ah, so you use Lisp for your conlang-related programming. Does this
language have any specific advantages that make it especially
well-suited for language (or more generally, string) handling?

I'm mostly using AWK for string handling at the moment, since that's
the language I'm most familiar with. There's also a couple of Perl
scripts for lexeme generation that I downloaded from Somewhere(tm) (I
don't do much Perl scripting of my own, though, I just use other
people's scripts); and at some point I *will* install SIL's PC-KIMMO
so that I can use TWOL as well. (For anyone who's not familiar with
TWOL or Two-Level Morphology: it's a very powerful system for modeling
or describing morphology and phonetic changes. We used it a lot in a
company where I used to work, so once finally I get around to
installing PC-KIMMO, I won't even have to learn a new programming
language from scratch.)

But if Lisp is an extremely good language for string handling for some
reason, that would also be good news for me, since I'm learning Lisp
anyway (I'm using Emacs a lot and I've found that it's much more fun
if you know how to configure the thing; and for that you need to know
Lisp). :-)

[back to that "y for [@]" thing]
> Some (Latin script) natlang does this, I think, but I forgot which
> one. :-(
Hmm... Lots of natlangs seem to use <y> for [1] or for [M], and to the
untrained ear these two can sound like [@], but that's probably not
what you meant. ;-)

I've been told that in Welsh, the vowel spelled as <y> has an
allophone [@] in some dialects, but since I don't know any Welsh, I
have no idea how true *that* is...

> In Tyl Sjok, I have <w> for /3/, which is quite close to /@/, of
> course.  <y> is for /1/ there (now that's boring!).
Yes, soooo boring, *everybody* does *that*! Don't you have *any*
imagination? ;-)

Seriously, though, <w> for a central vowel is quite interesting. I
don't think I've seen anything like this before.

Regards,
Julia

--
   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)

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