Re: Caucasian phonologies and orthographies

From: "John Quijada" <jq_ithkuil@...>

> I'm honored that you should mention Alan S. Kaye; he was my linguistics
> professor 20 years ago at Cal State Fullerton.  He and I co-wrote the
> article on the Fremen language for the Dune Encyclopedia (Berkeley Books,
> 1984).  I didn't know he had a book on comparative phonology - I'll have
to
> find it.  As for Ithkuil, the site is at
> http://home.inreach.com/sl2120/Ithkuil.
Haven't read Dune yet, but my brother has all the books somewhere....

I saw the phonology for Ithkuil just now, and it did make me think of North
Caucasian (also Indo-Aryan). The script made me think of Star Wars and Star
Trek. So I'm not alone in having a Speedtalk-like project (Tech is supposed
to be spoken by humanoids with exceptional intellect), where you say as much
as you can in as little time as possible. Maybe that's how the Abkhazians
and Circassians were thinking with Northwest Caucasian, or the Berbers with
Tamazight....

The little bit of Tech you've seen is pretty ugly. A lot of ejectives and
"guttural" consonants, yes, but you may have noticed the lack of vowels --
schwas are inserted epenthetically, and even the short vowels came from
earlier long vowels and diphthongs. (There will be long vowels... maybe.)
While the vowels were reduced, the consonant inventory was nearly tripled
because of resulting palatization of Ci > Cj, and labiovelarization of Cu >
Cw. This came from a philosophy of "compression", a feature that appears in
Quebequois French (if I'm not mistaken), where they say something like
_j'n'taime pas_ for "I don't love you".

In other words, you get the opposite of 'Olelo Hawai'i.

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