Re: Simafira: phonetics

Jesse Bangs wrote:

> > For one thing, the script is completely phonetic.  (Is this
> > unusual?)
>
> Nah, there's no problem with it.  Some of us like to mess things up, but
> some of us don't.
>
> > There are a few sounds missing to try and make the language "flow"
> > similarly to, but not exactly like, a Polynesian language.
>
> Missing from what?  If the sounds you mentioned are the only ones not in
> your conlang then that means you must have a really awful consonantal
> system, full of retroflex nasal clicks and voiced uvular ejectives and
> other such monsters.  <<shudder>>
Are there even such things as voiced uvular ejectives?  Voiced ejectives
are, IIRC, very very rare (Mam has one, I think) -- though voiced
implosives are not.

> > Affricates were done away with, softened to [f] or [Z].  The sound for
> > "r" is [R]. I also  removed [g], [v], and [z]; [v] was reassigned to [f], [z] to [Z].
> >Words themselves are constrained so that they may not end with a stop.
>
> I'm confused now.  It sounds like you're talking about changing one
> language into another, saying that "[v] was reassigned to [f]" and that
> "Affricates were done away with."  Yet you never directly mention parent
> nor daughter language.
I interpreted Steve's comments as saying that he started out with some
set -- not necessarily an ideal one -- and then changed it.  That could mean
one or more of at least two things:
(1) He was envisioning an earlier stage of the same language, and what
happened to it after those changes;
(2) He just didn't like his earlier set, for esthetic reasons, and so changed it
In either case, he seems to have done so with regular *rules*, though.

> My guess is that you are (subconsciously?) starting from your idea of an
> "ideal" phoneme set, and then deciding which phonemes are added to that
> set, and which are lost.  The problem is that I don't know what your
> ideal phoneme set is, and in fact, there *is* no universal phoneme set.
True, but there are phonemes that are typologically more common than
others -- the stops [p t k] are more common than their glottalic equivalents
[p' t' k'], and the same voiceless stops are more common than their voiced
equivalents [b d g].

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos