changes to LANKA (Trollish)

Well I thought a bit about how I have words always ending in a vowel, and found
that the language resembled Japanese too much so it could be taken as an insult,
and it was "overpretty", especially for a not-so-pretty race of humanoids.

So now words may end in ONE consonant, and that final consonant isn't really
pronounced (thanks to the Cajun background of Rev. Daniel Boucher, S.J., the
language's inventor). Words that end in non-nasals leave a "clipped" final
syllable unless the final vowel is long (i.e. doubled), while words ending in
nasals are pronounced with a final nasal vowel, or, more likely, an "ng" sound
at the end (so PON "good" is pronounced [poN] or occasionally [po~].

Second, the letters Y and W are not used, since Trolls don't really see any
difference between [i] and [j] or [u] and [w] except in their duration. So I and
V (used in lieu of U) are both semivowels (/j/, /w/) and vowels (/i/, /u/).
Also, instead of S being replaced by C, K is replaced by C (but like Classical
Latin and Irish, is always velar).

This is because Father Danny used a conservative model of the Latin alphabet,
and found C easier to draw for the Trolls than K (which might be mistaken for
two letters, IC). And there were fewer letters to write anyway. So the entire
alphabet became: A C E I L M N O P S T V -- 12 letters than all, and a smaller
phonology than even Hawai'ian (LANKA has no phonemic glottal stop).

The vocabulary is still derived from English and French, but I might change that
to Latin or Esperanto in the future if I feel like it.

I don't have a homepage (and don't really want one), but I'll work on a document
on LANKA soon and post it in my webspace I got at MSN Communities.

~Danny~