Re: CHAT: The [+foreign] attribute

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> There seems to be some evidence that for speakers of a language, there is
> some other specific language that all foreign words are assumed to be in.
> For English, it's French.
>
> A lot more on this at http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/6/6-555.html#1
>
> ObConlang: how do people's conlangs handle foreign words?
Overwhelmingly, most of the foreign loans into Phaleran are
from the C'ali languages (especially Classical C'ali), which
together comprise an impact on Phaleran's lexicon something
analogous to the Latin and Romance languages on English.
Although Classical C'ali provides the largest number of loans
and constructions, the language that is actually referenced for
[+foreign] pronunciations is Trans-Aliderian C'ali, one of its
daughter languages.  In this as in many of Classical C'ali's
daughter languages, voicing has become more salient than
aspiration in its stop series and words that are spelled with
such voicing distinctions in Phaleran are sometimes pronounced
that way if they have not been nativized.  The truly pretensious
sometimes even pronounce so-called glottalized aspirates (e.g.,
<th'>, <kh'>) as they were pronounced in Classical C'ali, as
a combination of aspirate plus glottal stop or glottalized
stop plus /h/ (depending on dialect).

ObLexicon:  The latest word in the Phaleran lexicon is _gessâli_
"peacock, peahen".  The inspiration came from my own encounter
early this morning with one of the wild peacocks that inhabit
the part of Houston that I live in. They live along the bayou,
which is close to my house.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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