Re: Introductory Post

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.