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Re: Introductory Post

From:Tristan <kesuari@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 5, 2003, 6:14
Kallah wrote:
> New member, non-academic,
Welcome! Most people here are amateur linguists, so don't worry about being a non-academic.
> currently working on a very loosely Semitic > language for a novel. It uses the tri-consonantal roots (with > occasional two and four-consonant roots), and a pattern system (still > incomplete). However, the triangularity common to semitic languages > isn't really present (largely because I found out how it worked, more > or less, well after I'd gotten the basics of the language where I > liked them).
Which makes it all the more interesting, doesn't it now? :)
> (á=/aw/ in caught, â=/ah/ in father, î=/ee/ as in feed, a as in cat.)
I'm afraid those pronunciations don't help much. English vowels difffer horribly from dialect to dialect. I, an Australian, pronounce 'caught' differently from Americans, for example. To me, the way a New Zealander says 'cat' sounds almost like 'ket', whereas some American pronunciations of 'bet' sound almost like 'bat' to me. I suggest you learn the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and X-Sampa (and ASCIIfication thereof); we use them quite extensively here. <http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/> has pronunciations of the IPA letters, but recent discussions here suggest that it's not necessarily accurate. (There are others about too, but I can't find the URLs just now---someone else will no doubt post them.) See also <http://www.conlanglinks.tk/> for more information about the IPA and X-SAMPA. Until you've learnt it, if you tell us where you're from, we may be able to better work out what vowels you mean. Tristan.