Re: USAGE: Fänyläjikyl Inglyx

I do see Your point... and I am not perfectly happy with the vowel system
yet.
But as far as obscuring words goes, most people cannot differentiate too
many
vowels (especcially being taught at school that there are only five of th=
em)
and
words that look/sound the same would always be clarified by syntax.  If t=
hat
were not the case than differently spelled words would have to be reworke=
d
if ever someone wanted to recite them in a speech and remain intelligable.

Have You any suggestions for a possible vowel system?  If possible, start
out from a British RS dictionary, as that is what I myself am working wit=
h
for now.

Regarding cut and cot, the main difference seems to be the length of the
vowel.  cUt being short, and cOt being middle-length.  I wish there was
some way of properly representing these things... well, I'll try to find =
one
anyways.  Difficult when English has three lengths.

And it bat and bet I think the difference is also in the length.  Am I
wrong?

Sincerely,
                 Roland H=F6nsch

----- Original Message -----
From: John Fisher <john@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 1999 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: Re: F=E4nyl=E4jikyl Inglyx


In message <00b701bf404e$fa388ca0$cd7a6395@andreehome>, Roland Hoensch
<hoensch@...> writes

>The following is "Received Standard" (British)
I think my main practical point here would be:

>aback:  ybek
>abet:  ybet
In other words, the two phonemes /&/ and /E/ are written the same way,
so that "bet" and "bat" would both be written "bet",  "said" and "sad"
would both be written "sed" and so on.  This is a distinction which does
a lot of work and I would suggest that it's a bad idea to obscure it.

>abduct:  ybd=E4kt
>abolish: yb=E4lix
This implies that the vowels in "cut" and "cot" would also be written
the same.  This distinction is also important.

I appreciate that you haven't set yourself to represent every
distinction in the language, and that's fine, because some of them
aren't very important (such as the difference between the vowels in
"full" and "fool", for example).  But as it stands I think your system
would end up confusing a fair number of words which the current system,
in its unsystematic way, manages to write differently.

--
John Fisher   john@drummond.demon.co.uk   johnf@epcc.ed.ac.uk