Re: A prioi vs. A posteriori ?

James Landau wrote:

> "On of my first "serious" conlang was a half-hearted IAL, based on the
> idea thata true IAL should be easy to pronounce to everyone. I ended up
> using only fourvowels (/a/, /o/, /u/ and /i/, which had allophone [e] at
> the end of a word,don't ask me why...)
To make it hard for English-speakers to prononuce properly? We seem to
have an aversion to that (*cringes at the sound of borrowing word-final
[e] as 'ay'*[1] don't people realise that even 'ee' sounds better and is
probably closer to the original sound?? ... /me goes back to  inisisting
'anime' be /%ani:\"me:/, spelt 'unnimaire' if needs be. I've already
convinced one person! (Doubt I'd convince anyone here with all of your
incompatible dialects. Someone who'd think of it as /@nim&r/, even one
that knew Japanese, wouldn't have a hope of understanding it. All the
more reason :) ))

[1]: I realise it has historical validities, and probably present ones
in Other Dialects (but there's no need to confirm that). It just sounds
really bad when 'ay' is /&i/.

> and four consonants (/k/, /m/,
> /s/, /f/, I had only onestop because I considered that they were too
> difficult :)) . How naive...). Thegrammar was basically a monster mixing
> noun cases, gender (a masculine in -aand a feminine in -o, it was my
> rebel days ;))) ),
On a related note, I've never really associated -a with feminine and -o
with masculine mysef. Perhaps the fact that my middle name is
/&lIgz&:nd@/* has something to do with that, but I doubt it. That I've
always called my maternal grandfather 'Opa' is probably at least as
important. It took me some time to finally work out which was Nonna and
Nonno (?) for my primaryschoolfriends of ultimately Italian extraction.

*Silent -r, but my sister when we were really young (before I was in
school) thought it was the feminine and /&lIgz&:ndr@/ was the masculine.

> and verbs using plenty ofperiphrastic constructions a
> la English verbs."
Are these those things like 'to call off'? Other than the Germanic
languages, what languages do them?

> The header being from none but:
> From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
What was the date? How old a message am I replying to? :)

> I'm learning!
And don't think it stops anytime soon! My 88-y.o. grandmother (who is
'grandma', being my father's mother) assures me it hasn't stopped yet
(or at least, a few years ago she did).

Tristan.

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