Re: CHAT: A sample of my newborn conlang

On Sun, 27 Jan 2002 01:20:45 +0100
taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...> wrote:

> * Stephen Mulraney said on 2002-01-25 04:31:28 +0100
> > Here's the pronunciation in X-SAMPA. I notate diphthongs by preceeding them
> > by periods - I write <ruigh> as /4.uiG/
> >
> > <Ryf elcwe  nau  shuula ar sthoolegh kyn feeagh wriruighenaetha ar laudh
> > /4yf ElkwE n.au Su:lA  A4 sTo:lEG   qyn fe:AG  w4i4.uiGEn.AETAs A4 l.auD
>
> Welcome to "The Close Rounded Vowel Lovers Club"! Dix points for the
> tap, too, and another ten for the diphthongs!
;) Well I must admit I feel a bit embarassed about all those nice vowels
- they are a guilty pleasure. But I think I should allow myself guilty
pleasures in my first conlang, no? ;) There's i-affection for word-forming
and inflectional reasons, so the language *should* be full of close vowels,
and all the sequences tend towards close rounded too!

> I'll even throw in five
> for the /A/, it's so discriminated against by all these [a]-bigots!
> *pompous, haughty sniff* </aesthetics>
Yeah, /A/ is a pretty new discovery for me ;), though it occurs in my
idiolect (almost wrote 'idiotlect') when I'm declaiming or putting on a
posh voice... At the time I wrote the above, I wasn't quite sure about
how the vowels /a/ and /A/ were going to be used, and I'm still not
sure; but I can say that <a> (or/and maybe <aa>) is usually realised by
/A/ (/A:/). Plain old /a/ might appear in one or two diphthongs; it's
still up in the air. Because of the productive sound changes in the
lang, I really needed to see what words looked like *before* I could
start on the grammar; and I wasn't too careful at that stage to pin down
the exact values of the vowels (or some of the consonants)

> Your diphthongs, are they rising, falling or centered? That is:
> - rising: second vowel more prominent than the first
> - falling: first vowel more prominent than the second, like [aI] in
>     "high". (For those who have a diphthong there, of course.)
> - centered: both vowel more or less equally prominent, the shift from
>     one to the other usually more audible. (I'd say the Norwegian /ai/-
>     phoneme is more centered than it is falling, like in "hai", shark.)
Well, first of all see the last sentence of my previous paragraph. At
the moment I think that they're usually falling, but some (e.g. <oe>)
are definitely nearer centered. However, consider the mutation (the
i-affection mentioned above) that sends, say (working with phonemes
for the moment) [a] to [ae] to [ai]: With regard to phonemes, that's
the end of the line, and affecting [ai] just gives [ai] again. But,
phonetically we get the following: /A/ > /Ae/ > /ai/ > /(ai):/. That
is, there's a further 'long' allophone of [ai] used in i-affection,
and these allphones are I think rising. The extra allophone is notated
in the orthography (as an accent over the middle of the diphthong, in
ascii I double the second vowel) so the plural of a hypothetical noun
*<cutai> would be *<cutaiir> (compare with *<cutae> > *<cutair>). As
far as I know that plural-final -r (and other features in places where
i-affection occurs) always occurs; so their are no minimal pairs making
<ai:> a phoneme.

A question: to what degree is the definition of a phoneme via minimal
pairs meaningful? e.g. in the extreme case, suppose only one minimal
pair establishing a phoneme <X> as distinct from <x> occurs; is always
then legitimate (from a speaker's and not a linguist's point of view) to
make that distinction everywhere else in the languge, e.g. coining a new
form <Xyz> alongside <xyz>? Moreover, if the minimal pair only occurs in
a very constrained (non-phonetical) environment - say in a particular
*grammatical* situation, (e.g. the imperative <flbXy> as opposed to the
3rd person pres.ind.act <flbxy>) does this still establish the phoneme
as firmly (in the sense mentioned in the parenthesis above) as have
two series of minimal pair e.g. of basic vocabulary.

Finally, what if the environment is not grammatical but 'contextual',
so that one cannot tell (by meaning) <rdrx> from <rdrX> except by
referring to the context; and that it is an error to use <rdrx> in the
context appropriate to <rdrX> (& vice versa)? Still?

(An example of the last might be "What about this flrb[xX]y?"
Where following "I'm hungry", the word is <flrbxy> and means
"tasty pre-dunked muffin" while after "What'll we do tonight?"
the word is <flrbXy> meaning "movie starring Steve McQueen")

(A provisional response might be that 'rare' phonemes will tend to be
(s)quashed by analogy, thus collapsing a minimal pair (but languages can
deal with that), while more common phoneme might tend to spread, also
by analogy, becoming more established?)

> When two neighboring vowels are not a diphthong, are they separated by
> hiatus or by a glottal stop? (Hmm, is there even a symbol for hiatus in
> the IPA?)
hiatus. No glottal stops in this lang (unless they slip in from my
idiot-lect, but I don't think it has so many either). Definitely not
as phonemes anyway ;)

> Liked it, could even pronounce it, keep up the good work.
Thanks! Nice to see that it's pronouncable ;).

> t., who ought to complete that paper on diphthongs
;)

Stephen