Re: On the design of an ideal language

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