Re: New Hadwoid lang

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Muke Tever wrote:

> Basically, this happened:
>
> - Already in Hadwan we had [A: E: I: U: Y:] going to [Q: e: i: u: y:].
>
> Then:
> - [Q] > [O]
> - [e:] > [i:] **
>
> then,
>
> -Stressed   [O: e: i: u: y:]
> became      [O  i  i  u  y]
>
> -Unstressed [A E I U Y O: e: i: u: y:]
> became      [@ @ E o 9 O  e  i  u  y]
>
> The other original vowels not changing.
>
> [I *think*.]   So an original <a> /A(:)/ became any of [A @ O] depending on
> original length and stress.
> (Also, <e> to [E i @ e]; <i> [I i E]; <o> [U u o]; <y> [Y y 9].)
>
> Basically it's just two changes: quantity becoming quality, and
> unstressed-weakening.
>
> (Some of those [@] will disappear, too.  I haven't decided under what
> circumstances though.)
Okay; this makes sense now. Except for this:

> ** [e:] should actually not under normal circumstances appear as a phoneme
> in native words.  What's more, the sound spelled by this letter might have
> always been [i:] and never pronounced as [e:] at all (in which case I should
> throw out the e: > e rule).  I'll have to look into it.
When I trace the changes you mention, you have a merger of long
non-low front vowels ([i:, e:]) to [i:]. But later in the
changes to the stressed set, you still have [e:]. Did it change
to [i:] or not?

> Actually, for some reason digraphs never entered my mind for this.  (I am a
> victim of the "One phoneme, one grapheme" poltergeist.)  That may be an idea
> to work on, while this lang's still in draft.
Not everyone agrees with me about the desireability of digraphs;
but it is a solution I no longer discount.

> >(I'd actually be happy with adding some letters to the basic
> >set; things like thorn, eth, wynn, and some Cyrillic characters
> >that seem to be really useful as well.)
>
> I wanted to spell [G] with yogh.  Mm.
I forgot yogh. In my ASCII documentation of Tepa, I use <3> for
[G], inspired by yogh.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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