Re: Revising my consonant inventory

Wow, thanks all for your very useful comments!

Alex Fink wrote:
<<<<<<
As far as I know, languages which allow different cluster sets internally
and finally will make the internal set a superset of the final set.
(Counterexample, anyone?)
>>>>>>
Herman Miller wrote:
<<<<<<
[h] could perhaps be an allophone of /x/, or even something like [p\]
and [h] as allophones of /h/ (as in Japanese). There are certainly
languages with /h/ and /x/ as distinct phonemes (e.g., German, Arabic),
but I think those tend to be languages with larger consonant inventories
in general (although that's just a vague guess on my part; I haven't
specifically looked for this).
>>>>>>
My own dialect of Dutch makes distinction between /X/ and /h/, while some
others do between /x/ and /h/. I wanted to point out that my native language
makes kindof this distinction without having a well... is 19 consonants a
large inventory? (my dialect merges all voiced-unvoiced fricatives into
unvoiced ones.)

John Vertical wrote:
<<<<<<
*a lot*
+ Not an insignificant proportion of languages lack rhotics. Can you do a
tapped /4/ tho?
>>>>>>
Yes, that's no problem... actually I don't have trouble with the consonantal
sounds I've encountered, /r/ however is something I can't even approximate.
I'm probably going with both /4/ and /r`/ here, maybe allophonic.. or just
/4/... to much doubting at the moment, hehe. I'll also go with phonemic /5/,
I got that idea from Turkish actually.

and also wrote:
<<<<<
1) Woah, syllabic nasals. Cool.
>>>>>
I realize now how much influence your native language can have on your
conlanging by various comments people have made on this. Sylliabic nasals
occur in my dialect of Dutch when the plural suffix -en is used (and they
assimilate to -m, -n and -N). Although I don't actually use this anymore
since I now speak more or less standard Dutch adding those to the final
clusters seemed totally normal. :)

I have one more question, is /?_h/ possible, or would that become /h/ within
minutes? Then I might ditching /p/ alltogether and have /t k ?/ and /t_h k_h
?_h/

I know this isn't a very big post, but for now my revisions are far from
done... Your comments were very helpful however so I'll have something more
elaborate posted soon.


Nick Scholten