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Re: On the design of an ideal language

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 3, 2006, 17:00
Hi!

Jim Henry writes:
>... > An early draft of this engelang I'm working on had a phoneme > inventory where no two phonemes differed by less than two > distinctive features, and voicing was not distinctive (all were > voiced in shouting-over-background-noise mode and all unvoiced in > whisper-mode). But it was both cacaphonous and verbose, and didn't > have much room to grow the vocabulary with reasonably short words, > so I abandoned that phonology early on. >...
This sounds very interesting to me. One of my drafts I made recently after some discussion was similar, but used voice to help mark morpheme boundaries (while it did not rely on it). But your proposal of usage of non-phonemic voice is nicer, I think. :-) (Of course, one could do both if it's not phonemic.) **Henrik