Re: phonemic silence??

On Tuesday, July 12, 2005, at 01:34 , Sanghyeon Seo wrote:

> On 7/12/05, # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
>> I thought of something that I found very odd: a phonemc silence
>>
>> Is there a language in which the lenght or simply the presence of a
>> silence
>> in a sentence could mean something concrete?
>
> Lojban has a phonemic pause. From Lojban Reference Grammar Chapter 3:
Yes, indeed. Presumably also in Solresol there must have been a slight
pause between singing, humming, whistling (or whatever) one set of notes
and another. There may be other conlangs also - tho I cannot think of any
immediately.

But if Max was thinking of natlangs, I strongly suspect the answer is
likely to be 'no'.

I have often considered that musical conlangs (musilangs??) like Solresol
could extend their phonemic inventory by giving note-length phonemic value,
  in which case pause-length might well also have phonemic value. Now there'
s a thought   :)

Ray
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