Re: Needed: Fresh eyes for phonology

At 06:55 PM 3/26/2002 -0600, you wrote:
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>         With all this talk regarding the most beautiful of phonologies, I
> thought,
>"Hey, time to look at Enamyn's phonology again." It was at that point that I
>realized that Enamyn is really Tolkienesque. Judge for yourself:
>
>Plosives: /p b  t  d  k/
>Nasals: /m n/
>Fricatives: /f v  T  s  S  x/
>Laterals: /l  K/
>Trill: /r/
>Approximate: /j/
>Affricates: /ts  tS/
>
>Vowels: /i E a o M/ (/M/ represents unrounded /u/, and I am thinking of
>de-rounding /o/ to /7/...)
    Well, I'm not sure what you're aiming for, but this looks plenty
realistic to me, and not as tolkienesque as you think. On the Quenya side,
you've got the affricates and some fricatives not used, and again the
affricates as compared to Sindarin. I reallt like the affricates, actually
(well, not such a big fan of /tS/, but I adore /ts/).

   The only things I could think of adding are voiced companions to /T/ and
the sibilants, and perhaps even a /G/ or /g_h/ or however the Sampa for a
voiced velar fricative would be written. On the other hand, the lack of /g/
makes for an interesting gap, and one that explains the lack of other
voiced variants. I too have often though longingly of giving up /g/, but I
always put it back, realizing that my lang was turning out to 'm'-y, and
sounded like someone mumbling around a mouthful of peanut butter.

   As to pattern, I don't see any, but then we know how I am about
phonology! Though I don't think a pattern is really required - there are
natlangs out there with stranger distributions and unexplainable gaps.

   And of course, the sound of a language, as I'm coming to learn, depends
_so much_ on the relative frequency of your sounds. If stops account for
50% of all consonantal phonemes, the lang will sound very different than if
fricatives count for 50%. So I don't think you should worry, or fret, or
whatever, until you have a good sample of vocabulary determined. Then you
can see if everything is mumbling or tapping, and adjust accordingly.
That's what I've been doing, changing a lot of morphemic suffixes (because
I tend to make them all -n-).

   I hope this helps!

   Aidan