Re: Phonology - request for comments

In a message dated 8/30/1999 1:01:47 AM, raccoon@ELKNET.NET writes:

>Until this point, my Proto-Dhak phonology has looked like this (monospaced
>font is helpful!):
>
>         UVP  AUVP   VP   UVF  VF  N    A
>bilabial p    p_h    b    p\   B   m    w
>dental   t_d  t_d_h  d_h  T    D   n_d  l
>alveolar t    t_h    d    s    z   n    r
>palatal                                 j
>velar    k    k_h    g    x    G   N
>uvular   q    q_h    G\   X    R   N\
>glottal  ?    ?_h         h
<snip>
>A=approximant or other
<snip>
>3) This system seems too "ordinary" to me; I want something more "exotic,"
>yet still organized nicely and with few gaps (such as the fricatives without
>corresponding stops cited in #2).
One problem, IMHO, is your A category, which you loosely defined as
"approximant or other." You put in it the common grouping of a bilabial-velar
approximant (I'm not familiar with X-SAMPA, but I think that "w" represents a
bilabial velar trill [it does in IPA], which is the one used in English and
many other languages), a palatal approximant, a lateral dental approximant,
and an alveolar trill. Why not just make it all approximants, or all trills?
And why make the dental one lateral and the others not, other than because it
conforms to other languages' phonologies? There's nothing wrong with having
non-lateral dental approximants, or velar or uvular appoximants, or velar or
uvular lateral approximants. Or you could do bilabial, alveolar, velar and
uvular trills. You could also make any or all of these unvoiced!

This system isnt really organized as nicely as it looks, since the last
column is really a smushing together of what should really be three separate
columns and one extra row (if you do mean to use a bilabial-velar approximant
- it would be more interesting if you decided to make it just bilabial).

Just my $0.02. :-)

Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian