Re: Nonpulmonic conlang?

  Sai Emrys wrote:
 >> Has anyone made a conlang that exclusively uses nonpulmonic
 >> phone(me)s? Or, has ANADEW?
.........

Veoler replied:
> Well, I once made a nonpulmonic relex of my main conlang. But it only
> lasted for a day. One thing that put me off was that I had a hard time
> remember what sound each letter in the orthography represented. Maybe
> it had been better if I had used IPA, but I'm not yet knowledgeable in
> the nonpulmonic area of IPA.
Let's see. If we don't use the pulmonic airstream, then we are left with
two other possibilities: glottalic (or pharyngeal) airstream; lingual
(or velaric) airstream.

(a) Let's consider the glottalic airstream first:
If the airstream is egressive (i.e. air flows out of the body) then we
produce what are commonly called ejective stops. As the airstream never
has chance to pass the larynx these stops must be voiceless. The IPA
symbols are exactly the same as fr ordinary (i.e. pulmonic) voiceless
plosive followed by a raised comma. If we're not going to have pulmonic
consonants, then we as well simply use |p t k|.

If the airstream is ingressive (i.e. is drawn into the body), then we
have implosive consonants. When the glottis is released and the
airstream drawn inward there tends to be some vibration of the vocal
chords, so these sounds tend to be voiced when they occur in natlangs
(not uncommon, e.g. in many African languages). the IPA symbols are the
same as corresponding (pulmonic) plosives with a hook added above. We
could, therefore, simply use |b d g|.

(b) the lingual (velaric) airstream:
If the airstream is egressive, it's known as spitting, which is, maybe,
not a sound we'd want to include     ;)

Sounds made with an ingressive lingual airstream, however, do occur in
natlangs and are normally called 'clicks'. If we're content to restrict
ourselves to the three found, e.g. in Zulu & Xhosa, then we can use the
same spelling as that found in those languages, i.e.
|c| = dental click; |q| = post-alveolar click; |x| = lateral click.
These languages use |ch, qh, xh| for aspirated clicks, |nc, nq, nx| for
nasal clicks and |gc, gq, gx| for voiced clicks - but......

The production of clicks, however, does involve two types of airstream.
The primary articulation of the click is made by an ingressive velaric
airstream, but there is a secondary pulmonic egressive airstream. For
example, the initial sound of _Xhosa_ is a lateral click with secondary
articulation of aspirated velar plosive. So it depends, I guess, on how
strict one wishes to be in interpreting "exclusively uses nonpulmonic
phone(me)s."

>
> Another thing was that I felt that each phoneme behaved as a syllable,
That I do not understand. All the above sounds are contoids (_phonetic_
consonants); they cannot possibly behave as syllables.

For a syllable, we need a vowel to form the nucleus of the syllable. But
  as the oral cavity is so much smaller than the lungs, vowels and
approximants cannot, I understand, be pronounced with either glottalic
or velaric initiation. So-called glottalized vowels and other sonorants
use the more common pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.

I assumed Sai was referring to consonant phonemes; maybe I was wrong.
Are nonpulmonic vowels at all possible.

> and I only had a low number of phonemes, so the language appeared very
> inefficient.
Are you saying that languages like Hawaiian(8 consonants + 5 vowels*),
and Maori (10 consonants + 5 vowels*) and so on are inefficient?

(* or 10 vowels if you reckon the long vowels as separate phonemes).
=================================

David Vercauteren replied:
 > I very much doubt whether ANADEW. There are hardly any languages
lacking one
 > of p, t, k, m and n, and of those that do, none lacks them all.

I also doubt whether ANADEW - but I've been around too long to know how
unwise it is to say categorically there is _no_ ANADEW. In fact, as soon
as it gets rule out completely, someone comes along with a natlang from,
say, Papua-New Guinea or the Amazon basin (or some other remote place)
which does do it!! So I ain't ruling it it.

Hey, it's an intriguing idea for a conlang  :)

--
Ray
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Frustra fit per plura quod potest
fieri per pauciora.
[William of Ockham]

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