Re: Opinions on English (was Re: basic vocab)

On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 05:01:01PM -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
> Roger Mills wrote:
> > But somehow I doubt I'll ever introduce nasalized vowels into a
> > conlang.
>
> I had them for one conlang.  Didn't much like that one.  Nasalized
> vowels are now for proto-forms.  :-)
[snip]

I *love* nasal vowels! They're like a way to increase the number of
monosyllabic words you can have in your language... very important for
highly inflected conlangs where each word occupies quite a large space in
the set of possible monosyllables. Also, nasal vowels have that nice
hollow ring to it that's useful for interjections -- e.g., "huh" sounds
more huh-ish when pronounced nasally :-P

Of course, I'm biased by the fact that my mother tongue distinguishes
between nasal and non-nasal vowels. E.g., [Kirsh] /i:/ = aunt, /i~:/ =
round/circular (there's a specific tone to it as well, but I forget which
tone number it is).


T