Re: Linguistic Flavor

On Sat, 9 Jun 2001 David Peterson wrote:
> [CJ "Ciege" Miller wrote:]
> << through a quient ancient forest, more than babbling brooks
> and  singing birds. Am I just nuts? >>
I interject that "quient" in "quient ancient forest" may mean
"quiet" or "quaint" and that David took it to mean "quiet"
in this response:
>
>     I suggest a lot of vowels and dipthongs with few consonants.
> Those consonants you do have (again, in my opinion) would be
> mainly fricatives (non-retroflex--in fact, no flaps or trills at all),
> all unvoiced, and if you need a stop, just t p and k.  I'm thinking
> lots of [s], [S], [f], [T] maybe even [tS].  But the highlight of the
> language is the vowels.  The consonants are just the things you
> have to suffer through to get to the long, sweet vowels.  This is
> what I think up when I see the words "walk through a quiet,
> ancient forest".  Of course, you just need one person to say they
> think of the totally opposite thing, and you'll see the problem in
> asking advice for "linguistic flavor".  ~:) -David
We have some ancient forests here in the Pacific Northwest and
they are "quaint" but not "quiet" -- so here's a different sort of
suggestion: Do as the Salish Indians here did. Back in the 1960s,
an argument raged among linguists over whether their language
had one vowel or two. (The few remaining native speakers were
unaware of any vowel differentiation they may have been making.)

They mostly used p,t,k,s (and several variations of such sounds)
to start a syllable, and then either stuck their vowel sound directly
after such a consonant sound or stuck an "l" or "w" sound between
such a consonant sound and their vowel sound (except that a
word's final syllable could end with such a consonant sound or
with an "l" or "w" after such a consonant sound).

Several other Indian languages in this region (British Columbia,
Washington State, Oregon) also used "l" and "w" in that manner,
but I think that only the Salish ignored vowels so thoroughly.

-- Tommie

Reply