stunt phonology

On 12/08 19:41  Roger Mills wrote:

> That's my reading of it too.  Strange indeed, but it's neat, and why not!?
> Essentially 3 front V, only 1 back-- possibly a first in Languages of the
> World! My guess would be that historical *u and *o merged somewhere along
> the way. Maybe /o/ has [u] allophones. (Pre-contact Tagalog had only /i a
> u/, but all the analyses by the Spaniards seem always to write final syl.
> /u/ with "o", which has carried over into the modern spelling.)
>
I had thought one idea for an alien language would be one that had no
cardinal vowels.  On a whim I visited
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/ascii-ipa.html and listed all the
non-cardinal vowels.  The resulting table looks like this:

     1  }
I Y        U
     @\ 8
       @
     3  3\
{      6

Hmmm.  It definitely looks unnatural to me.  Everything shifts towards
the centre of the mouth.  I wonder if distinction between all those
vowels bunched in the middle could be maintained?  There are some vowels
there that I haven't pronounced since phonology classes.  Even so it
could be worth further investigation. :)

Anyone fled screaming yet?

- andrew.
--
Andrew Smith, Intheologus                         hobbit@griffler.co.nz
alias Mungo Foxburr of Loamsdown
http://hobbit.griffler.co.nz/homepage.html

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