Re: Beek

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 11:47:12AM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> At 10:28 AM 9/15/03 -0400, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>
> >Mmmm, I like syllabic consonants. :-) (Pity Ebisedian doesn't have any.)
>
> Then you're just going to have to start working on a new language that does
> have syllabic consonants, aren't you? :-)
Why not :-) Except that I've been so slow at working on Ebisedian that I'd
never get *anything* done if I started another conlang.

[snip]
> In it, the word <karm>, 'shield" is pronounced in two syllables.  (The word
> should properly be written with an accent over the <a> to indicate stress
> on the first syllable.)  As a matter of fact, the /m/ is syllabic here
> because liquid plus nasal clusters in the syllable coda are illegal, to the
> illegal cluster is broken up by making the m syllabic.
Mmmm, I like syllabic /m/. :-)

Does this mean that the /m/ is usually consonantal, but turns syllabic
here because of phonological constraints?

> Other words from the same language with syllabic consonants: <tovl>, 'to
> instruct' and <tovlm>, 'instruction' (both of which should have accents
> over the <l> to indicate that it is stressed
So is /l/ syllabic in both these instances, or is it consonantal in
/tovlm/?

[snip]
> the /l/ is actually the nucleus of the syllable.  In forming a present
> active participle of this verb, the /l/ ends up in the syllable onset, and
> the word is stressed on the second syllable, which contains the
> /l/.  <tovleis>, 'instructing';  <toerevl>, (stressed on the second to last
> syllable) means 'war"; and then there is the minimal pair <mta> and <mta>,
> one of them stressed on the syllabic /m/ the other stressed on the
> <ai>.  (I don't know what either word in the minimal pair actually means,
> but I think that they are probably verbs.)
Interesting. Usually, I'd think of syllabic /m/ and consonantal /m/ as
being two totally different phonemes altogether. Your language seems to
alternate between them freely, which is rather interesting.

[snip]
> the unstressed -i is added.  (I wrote these words out and showed them to my
> husband, and he thought that it looked atrocious, or at least unappetizing
> or unappealing.  It turned him off, in any case.  I think there were too
> many consonants together and that he didn't like the look of accents over
> consonants.)
[snip]

Heh, he might get a fright out of Ebisedian then. The LaTeX orthography of
Ebisedian has circumflex consonants and vowels with multiple diacritics. A
single vowel can have a total of 4 diacritics: the "teardrop" accent (a
superscript hook), an acute, a macron, and a subscript tilde. When written
out in ASCII, it's even more atrocious; e.g., /`yy~'/ for
y-macron-teardrop-acute-tilde (the ` and ' are part of the vowel).


T

--
There are four kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

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