Re: DECAL: Examples #1: Phonetic inventory examples & motivations

Hallo!

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:24:35 -0800,
Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:

> [...]
>
> Q1: What is your *phonemic* inventory? I.e., what are all of the
> discriminated phonemes in your conlang(s). (IPA / CXS / X-SAMPA)
Old Albic has:

  /p/  /t/  /k/
  /b/  /d/  /g/           /i/  /y/  /u/
  /f/  /T/  /x/
       /s/      /h/       /e/  /2/  /o/
  /m/  /n/  /N/
       /l/                     /a/
  /w/  /r/  /j/

The vowels occur both short and (much less common) long.
Long vowels are tense and short vowels are lax.

> (Side question: CXS is the "standard" notation for this list?)
De facto, yes.

> Q2: What are the allophones? I.e., for each phoneme, what are the
> "normal" variants that don't change meaning?
The stops have "fortis" and "lenis" allophones of which the latter
occur after vowels and /w l r j/.  This rule operates across
word boundaries in certain cases, e.g. within an NP.

> Q2b: If you have any, what are the connotations / implications of the
> different allophones? E.g., do you use them for different dialects,
> registers, "accents", etc.?
Some rural dialects are described as having aspirated stops /p_h/,
/t_h/, /k_h/ for the fricatives /f/, /T/, /x/ by classical Old Albic
authors.  This pronunciation was generally considered rustic,
uneducated and ugly among urbanites.

> Q3: How do your choices for the above reflect the goals of your
> language? E.g., if it's an auxlang [here!?], it's probably motivated
> by having common, strongly "universal" common-use phonetics to
> maximize learnability. So, for whatever your goals are for the
> conlang, how do they apply to the choices you made for phonetics /
> phonology?
Old Albic is an artlang designed to fit my personal style, and also
to represent a plausible pre-Celtic language of Britain that is
a distant cousin to Indo-European.

Greetings,

Jörg.