Re: Llirine: introduction and phonology

On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 22:58:20 -0600 David Starner <starner@...>
writes:
> Hi. I'm new to this list, and to the actual pratice of conlanging. I'm
a
> student at Oklahoma State University, majoring in math and computer
> science.
Good to have you here!

> Llirine is the main language of the Sherall (a species of
> genetically
> engineered humans) of Llirine (one of their planets.)
> Linguistically
> important is the fact that they have limited lip movement and a
> more
> constant airflow than humans - hence they can't make plosives or
> bilabial sounds. (Is that correct? I have a goal of removing those
> sounds, but I don't really know what corresponding physiological
> changes
> would go along.)
Well, if they can't articulate plosives, then they really shouldn't be
able to pronounce nasals, either.  Contrary to what Nik said, a nasal is
basically a plosive with the velum down--the oral articulations are
identical.  However, there's an alternate I thought of.  Perhaps the
problem is that their velums are *always* down--they can't close them!
That would make any attempted oral stop into a nasal automatically.  It
would also nasalize all vowels and, well, every other sound in the
language.

I babbled to myself like this for a few minutes, trying as hard as I
could to keep my velum lowered constantly.  I found that (a) I couldn't
pronounce oral stops, obviously (b) I could still pronounce fricatives
without any trouble, and the acoustic affect of nasalization on voiceless
stops was almost nothing (c) I could still pronounce your clicks, they
just come out nasalized, but (d) I could barely pronounce [h], and it
always gained extra-glottal friction because of the lowered velum.  It
also tended to become breathy-voiced.  I couldn't pronounce [?] at all.

If you adopt always-lowered velum as the physiological criterion, then
the only things you might want to change is [h] ~ [h\].  I found that
distinction hard to make with a lowered velum.

You said they couldn't pronounce labial sounds.  Even if they can't do [p
b m f v], could they possibly do [w]?

> [snip phonology]
> Syllables are V, CV or CV{ll,n,n^,p}.
They have a final click?  That is extremely odd, and I'm 99% sure that no
real language has it.


Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
jaspax@ juno.com
"We couldn't all be cowboys
Some of us are clowns" --Counting Crows

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