Re: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project

On Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:56:21 -0400, Nick Scholten wrote:
>3: Vowel system:
>I don't worry to much about my consonant system, which is pretty basic
>except for distinguishing 3 lateral alveolars (/l/, /K/, and /K\/). But I'm
>much more unsure about my vowel system, which basically included /A E I O i
>u/ before I added allophony. I somehow thought this as 'unbalanced' so I
>created allophony where /A/ and /O/ are [a] and [o] in stressed sylliables.
Hmm.. you have an /i I/ contrast, but no */u U/ contrast, and nothing in the
mid round region either. This would suggest to me that it's /u O/ that pair
together in the same way as /i I/ do. Stressed /O/ being [o] (why not call
it /o/ then? is it more commonly unstressed?) fits into this scheme nicely.


>I also created an array of diphthongs but I'm really not sure if they would
>be fitting: /AE/, [ai] /Au/, [au] /OE/, [oi] /Eu/ /Ei/ /Iu/ (ones after
>comma are allophones in stressed sylliables).
Seems OK, altho there are a few issues. For starters, if your /ai oi/ have
become /E/-final when unstressed, /Ei/ probably wouldn't be exempt - but you
could restrict that to only occur as stressed; having merged with plain [E]
when unstressed. Also, /u/-final difthongs _not_ also becoming /O/-final when
unstressed (assuming that they even occur as that...) is a rather Latinate
thing to do, but maybe that is exactly what you were after here.

Similarly, the lack of "homorganic" /Ii Ou/ reminds me of Greek. The
former, 'fcors, would rather likely have merged into /i/, and maybe the latter
into /u/ too, as also in Greek?

I also observe that there *is* an /a E/ contrast in the initial elements of
difthongs, so they probably do *not* form a third pair similar to /i I/ & /u O/.
They, however, seem "unpaired", if that's the case. It wouldn't be out of
question for */a: a/ to simply merge while */i: i/ become /i I/ (again, as per
Latin), but I'm not as sure if also doing that for */E: E/ is very likely. But a
simple GVS-style vowel shift would easily circumvent this, whereby /i u/
actually come from */E: A:/, and */i: o:/ have difthongized to /ai au/.

The /i I/ and /u O/ distinctions don't have to have come out of historical
length, tho. Another option might be that [I O] used to be loered allophones
eg. before uvulars or pharyngeals; after which those elided or merged with
other sounds, leaving the contrast phonemic. /E A/ would be less likely to split
in such a context, so they could remain singlets.

So yes, it's a perfectly working and plausible vowel system - you could
probably even keep unstressed /Ei/ if you insist... Also, while it does suggest
to me an older form with 2*2 basic vowels */i o E A/, it doesn't HAVE to be
so; I'm sure there would be several other naturalistic ways to arrive at a
system with these kind of asymmetries. This speculation was just to check
that there's at least ONE way, which is sufficient to proov plausibility. :)

John Vertical