Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:

>
> Tech has a high number of consonants, but I don't know exactly how many.
Well, I actually don't know either. The figure I gave is just an approximation,
as I have been unable to make a proper phonemic analysis of Maggel (that's why
I always put Maggel pronunciations in brackets. Although I'm not using a
completely proper phonetic description - I usually omit to indicate that nasals
and liquids assimilate in voice with consonants in the same cluster, for
instance -, it's better than using //).

> It all
> depends on what I end up using when I get all the words made up.
I'm having the same ;))) .

>
> As for vowels, Old Tech had six, the predictable <a @ e i o u>.
> Long/short/zero
> gradation, fronting and backing umlaut, nasalization and possibly
> pharyngealization pad the number quite a bit.
>
Let's see for Maggel's vowels... A rough count gave 19 vowels, but you can
double that number through length. As for the diphtongues, I lost count at 30
(figure which you can readily double thanks to length of diphtongues
too! ;))) ). Now, the vocalic system of Maggel is so complicated (what with
vowel reduction and strengthening, diphtongations and monophtongations, strange
diphtongues like [AV] which contain components non-existent (AFAIK ;)) ) as
single vowels (here I mean [A], which doesn't show up in any word I have until
now, although it could well exist...), etc...) that I can't come up with a good
count of the number of phonemic vowels.

In short, I usually say that Maggel has 90-odd phonemes, even if it could very
well have actually 300 ;))) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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