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Re: new Unnamed Conlang

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Friday, September 17, 2004, 11:08
It's in general tricky to figure out exactly what's meant when the sounds of one
language is described in the terms of others, since no language is monolithic,
but is pronounced differently by different speakers. You'll eventually want to
learn some system for denoting sounds a bit more clearlyM; the one most useful
on this list would be CXS (to which I believe there's a link in the welcome
message). Anyway, some comments:

> phoneme pronounciation: > gh (like "GHent" in Holland)
This would seem to refer to a voiced velar fricative, but the sound is often voiceless in Dutch (same as 'kh' below). Spanish _fuego_ might represent a better example (no doubt, someone is now gonna point out that in some obscure dialect of Spanish, intervocalic 'g' is pronounced totally differently).
> kh (like "KHaan" in Mongolian)
Mongolian might be a poor example, since very few people speak it.
> o (like "cOt" & "Octopus") > u (like "tUt & "bUnk") > I (like "tIn" & "pIn"
I assume the capitalization is accidental?
> ii (like "sIght" and "strIve")
You might want to reconsider this one; it's very English-like, while most of the rest is not. I'd suggest 'ai'.
> a (like "bAt" & "cAn") > b (like "Bat" & "aBBey") > d (like "Dog" & "aDD") > jy (like "DJoser" in Ancient Egyptian)
I don't know how AE sounded, and I doubt anyone else does for sure either. What's worse, I don't even know what the conventional pronunciation of 'dj' is for it.
> n (like "NouN") > m (like "Math") > sy (like in East European languages) > zy (like in East European languages)
I do not know any East European languages that uses 'sy' and 'zy' as digraphs.
> s (like "Sop" & "Sip") > s' (like "Sheep")
Since you already have two digraphs in -h, I'd suggest switching to 'sh'. Andreas

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>