Re: Consonant allophones in Minza

Philip Newton skrev:
 > On 10/4/07, Benct Philip Jonsson
 > <conlang@...> wrote:
 >> It just strikes me that you can use something similar to
 >> the system for length and stress marking used in some
 >> Swedish dictionaries and educational material:
 >>
 >> | short unstressed:   ö   (no subscript)
 >> | short stressed:     ọ̈  (dot below)
 >> | long stressed:      ö̱  (macron below)
 >
 > The same system is used in my Duden for German.

Indeed? That's probably where it came from in the first
place. It's good in that it is kind of unintrusive WRT the
orthography of German or Swedish words: nothing which goes
on top of the standard diacritics of åäöü and nothing
which goes between the letters of the ordinary spelling. It
might be a problem if one hyperlinked a word marked up in
this way, though (I see no other pertinent use of
underlining in this time and age!).

 >
 >> The snag is that in Swedish length can occur only
 >> combined with (primary or secondary) stress.
 >
 > Same here.

Good to see the Germanic languages are not wholly
split up yet! :-)

 >
 > (Except in loanwords, which can have "half-long" vowels

And you are sure those are not secondary stressed? They
may exist in Swedish too, IINM.

 > - with the phonetic value of German long rather than short
 >   vowels, i.e. [e i o u y 2] instead of [E I O U Y 9] - in
 >   unstressed syllables. If their phonology departs too
 >   much from German, the words get transcribed wholly or
 >   partly in IPA rather than with dots or macrons
 >   underneath the orthography.)

The system could easily be modified thus:

| short unstressed:   ö
| short stressed:     ö̯
| long stressed:      ö̱
| 'half-long':        ọ̈

Come to think of it a rather full system for Swedish might
look like this:

|  ö̗   Acute accent below: short stressed acute
|  ö̖   Grave accent below: short stressed grave
|  ö̭   Circumflex below:   long stressed acute
|  ö̬   Caron below:        long stressed grave
|  ọ̈   Dot below:          short secondary stressed
|  ö̱   Macron below:       long secondary stressed

The placement of the secondary stress is of course
important, especially in grave-accented words, where the
significant pitch- rise does *not* fall on the final
syllable if another syllable after the main-stressed one is
secondary stressed. Examples would be mo̬torbu̱ren and
u̬tre̱dning. With pre-main secondary stresses: klạssifịkatio̭n

There are always the segment of the public who can't or
won't learn IPA.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
   à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
   ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
   c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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