Re: another newbie

Jeff Jones wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 15:47:40 -0500, David Barrow <davidab@...>
> wrote:
>
> >Hi all
>
> Welcome to the list.
>
Thank you

>
> >I'm another newbie. My interest veers more towards modifying languages
> >languages rather than constructing them from scratch. I call them what
> >if... languages in the sense of what would happen or have happened if
> >certain changes to the languages happen in the future,or had or hadn't
> >happened in the past, for example an English that hadn't lost most of
> >its inflexions  and had kept grammatical gender or an English without
> >Norse, Norman, French, Latin influence, but instead had kept the
> >original Anglo-Saxon vocabulary but had still undergone the sound
> >changes modern English went through (such as gws) Or inflected languages
> >such as Spanish, French, German with their inflexions reduced to a level
> >like that of English or even further
> >
> >Anyone else interested in modified languages? I speak English and
> >Spanish so my interest centres mainly around these two
>
> There are quite a few! You'll probably be hearing from some others very
> shortly. I mostly do languages from scratch, but have a Latin-derived
> conlang (Rubaga) that I work on on occasion, and also speak English and
> Spanish less badly than other natlangs, so feel free to show us.
Is it on a website?

>
snip

>
> >Looking at the SAMPA page:
> >
> >BrE has /e/ in pet AmE has /E/, but then the American page uses the same
> >/e/ for raise does that mean Americans pronounce raid the same way I
> >pronounce red? Or has someone made a mistake?
>
> I'm afraid someone has made a *mess*. The presentation there mostly omits
> the []'s and //'s, so that they have to be determined from context. The
> []'s enclose _phonetic_ notations, giving a fairly exact pronunciation,
> while //'s enclose _phonemic_ notations, the distinctions for a given
> language or dialect. Phonemic symbols can be pretty arbitrary, but
> generally, the simplest symbol that *suggests* the pronunciation is used.
> This means that phonemic symbols can't be compared across dialects.
>
would it be best to represent e in words like pet with /E/ for both standard
English and American
and words like raise would have /eI/ (English) and /e/ American

another snip

David Barrow