Re: Nonpulmonic conlang?

R A Brown wrote:
> 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.
>
The consonants I had was
p_> t_> t`_> k_> q_>
f_> s_> S_> x_> (or kx)_>) X\_>

O\ (if this is the x-sampa for open-mouth-until-the-lips-go-apart, a
smacking sound)

O\ (another consonant, a kissing sound)

And a consonant where you place the lips between the teeth, and then
draw the lips out from them, with the facial muscles, a bilabial
egressive airstream.

!\ where you hold your tongue as you initially do when you pronounce
tK)` and then make a click where the tongue hit the floor of the
mouth.

|\|\ where you release it as a lateral.


>>
>> 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.
>
>> 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).
>
I meant that if you have a syllable in a pulmonic lang, lets say
"gapkel", it is pronounced and perceived (by me) as two "units", which
happen to be syllables: gap + kel.

Now, in a non-pulmonic lang, I perceive each consonant as its own
"unit", which isn't a syllable but nevertheless are perceived as
equivalent unitwise to a syllable in a pulmonic lang. So a word with
six clicks is perceived as six units long, while "gapkel" only is two
units long, which makes the click word three times longer.

So, having only a few consonants, compared to the number of
_syllables_ in a natlang, such as Hawaiian, it felt much more
inefficient. But maybe a native speaker of the nonpulmonic lang would
be able to make it flow much better.

--
Veoler

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