Re: CHAT: feckly off-topic (was: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation)

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
> On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Joshua Shinavier wrote:
>
> > Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>
>
> Transcription can wreak havoc with a language - I was ever so surprised
> when I compared the recording of a Teonaht song Sally presents on her
> webpage with the text! Detailed instructions on how to pronounce sequences
> of signs aren't half as helpful as being able to hear the language.
Yes!  That's why more and more of us should get hooked up with RealAudio
and share our conlang sounds!

Several people have commented on my "user unfriendly" spelling of
Teonaht;
someone told me it was "counter-productive" to make "th" into "ht," and
"y" /j/ into "u," but that's the way the Teonim have been using the
Roman
script to transliterate their own script for decades! <G>  When you once
told me, Boudewijn, that you liked to read other conlangs aloud I
wondered,
but are you reading them *correctly*? <G>  Teonaht is quirky.   The word
for "birds" is _vaiuan_.   For all intents and purposes it looks like
VIE-wan.
It's pronounced VIE-an, to rhyme with "lion."  I'm sure there are others
on this list who still think that Teonaht is pronounced TEO-not.  It's
TEO-noth, to rhyme with "broth."   Likewise, "hs" is our "sh," "hk" is
Hebrew's "ch," "hd" is our voiced "th," and so forth.  And you need to
know
the rules of stress in order to give the syllables their proper
emPHASIs. ;-)

I've always been impressed by languages that look as though they are
pronounced
like this but when you hear them spoken they are pronounced like that.
When
Iva Bittova sings her Czech and I try to follow along with the script,
I'm
amazed at how little the spelling helps you with its true
pronunciation.  I
think this is true of many foreign languages, no less so Irish...!! so
I've
never really been too bothered that my Teonaht didn't give an accurate
representation of its sounds to English speakers.

Whoever said they thought that Teonaht was lovely in whatever post I
can't
seem to find now, I thank you!  It's much softer pronounced than
spelled,
its "ht"s are fricatives instead of stops, its "u"s are palatal glides
(unless they are vowels, as in "vul" --to rhyme with "dull").

Sally Caves
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoreal.html  <--for the song you
mentioned