Re: CHAT: YAC: or more exactly: yet another conlang sketch

John Cowan wrote:
>
> Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > Of course, this raises the question of how Rinyi and Nakiltipkaspimak
> > (dear God, that's a long time) came to be spoken on the same island, if
> > the two languages aren't related at all.
>
> Not really different from the case of English and Welsh being spoken
> on the same island; although there is a relation, the time-depth is
> such that it's not obvious to anyone but specialists.  In addition,
> on the island of New Guinea there are ~ 1000 languages spoken, many
> of which may be quite unrelated.
It's full well possible, of course, but it's something that should be
explained. It could be the terrain, keeping the languages isolated to a
certain extent. I believe that's the situation in New Guinea.

> > Off topic: I like how in German "s" represents /z/ in most situations,
> > and "z" represents /ts/, and "ss" represents /s/. However, I decided to
> > use the Polish convention of "c" for /ts/, and thus if "s" represents
> > /z/, what does "z" represent,
>
> How about /dz/?
Right now I'm doing that with "dz", a la Polish.

> > and what represents /s/? Any ideas out there?
>
> I like "ss" in that role.  The table:
>
>         ss      /s/
>         s       /z/
>         c       /ts/
>         z       /dz/
That's perfect! I'll probably use it, but that raises new questions...

How will I represent /S/ and /Z/? Right now they're "sz" and "z" with a
dot above it, respectively.

--
Robert