Re: replies to padraic brown and danny wier

From: "Nik Taylor" <fortytwo@...>

| Samuel Rivier wrote:
| > 4. aUI clone- not an international auxilary language,
| > but a UNIVERSAL auxilary language- how can one
| > communicate with aliens?
|
| I've thought about this a bit.  My notion is that there would be a small
| number of "phonemes" split into two categories (called A and B), each
| having, say, 8 "phonemes".  All "syllables" would be AB.  The nature of
| these "phonemes" would depend on the species.  For instance, for humans,
| A could be consonants (say, /p t k m n l f s/) and B could be vowels
| (say, /i i: e e: a a: u u:/).  Other species would use different
| values.  Simple AB would ensure that it would be easily adapted to a
| wide variety of communication systems.  I'm sure that any language would
| have to have phoneme-analogues.

Well my IAL project, which is intended only for humans at least now, but humans
from all over the world, has what could be a serious problem: it's not too
phonetically friendly to speakers of Polynesian languages, for instance; it
allows sequences of two consonants in medial positions (words cannot begin or
end with more than one consonant however).  It might be a problem for Japanese
speakers due to the existence of both /r/ and /l/ (I do intend to reduce minimal
pairs of r~l however).  And thought it does maintain a simple vowel system (the
same five phonemes as Spanish) speakers of languages with four or fewer vowels
such as Abkhaz, Greenlandic Inuit and Nahuatl might have problems, so I might
allow only three vowels in unstressed positions.

Phonetic flexibility is the rule when it comes to consonants like /r/ (which
could be a trill, a tap, a retroflex continuant or a uvular [R]), /h/ (could be
glottal, could be uvular [X]), or /s/ before /i/ ([s] and [S] are acceptable).

That is, if I ever get back to work on "P"...

| > 5. French sounds- so beautiful to the ear- maybe a
| > language based on french speech
|
| Beauty's in the ear of the beholder.  :-)  I like a few sounds in French
| like /Z/, but the over all sound is displeasing to me, it's mostly the
| front rounded vowels and nasalized vowels I dislike.  Also, not enough
| stops.

I like the nasal and front rounded vowels.  But that uvular R gets to me; I
still wanna trill it like Spanish (easier to pronounce anyway); the uvular grate
belongs in Arabic.  Pronouncing the Dutch G, a similar phone, gives me cotton
mouth; I wanna cheat and just say [g] like they do in Afrikaans, or is that
Flemish?

Oh well, anything's better than English.

~DaW~


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