Re: CHAT: First report on Coní (was: Re: CHAT: Bouncing)

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Andreasson Vpc-Work
  > As of now, I can give you a teaser. There are six vowels:
  >
  > /I E a O U 8/
  >
  > There's a rule which says that when a vowel is stressed, it
  > becomes tense: /i e a o u }/.

Isn't this a phonetic rather than a phonemic alteration?  It
would be better to use [...] instead of /.../ then.

And what about /a/?  It could become [A] in the tense or lax
position...



  > /8/ is written |û| as of now (u + circumflex).

I'm never fond of writing systems that assign complex glyphs
such as |û| to a low-profile vowel such as /8/.  IMHO, a vowel
that goes unnoticed in speech shouldn't stick out and wave its
hands in writing.  But that's totally subjective of course.

I would suggest |y| for the schwa, as Welsh does it AFAIK.  Or
since /8/ is basically /o/-flavored schwa, |ø| would also work.
The slash even suggests a certain "reducedness" that would fit
the concept of /8/.

Finally, you could just keep |u| for /8/ and use |w| or |û| or
|ou| or something for /u/ instead.

All these proposals are aimed at a schwa that stays central
under stress.  |Y|, |ø| or |u| would be a bit weird for [{].
Not impossible, though.

If you insist on /8/ being realised as [{] under stress, you
might want to use |æ| (ae ligature) instead.



  > If this vowel
  > can be prepalatalized (like the other vowels) we have a problem.
  > Prepalatalization is marked by diaresis: |ä| is /ja/. Irregular
  > stress is marked by an acute accent (as in the language name:
  > Coní). How do you combine diaresis and/or acute accent with a
  > circumflex?

Hmmm.  I tend to abstain from diacritics as far as possible, since
they make the written text so messy.  Why not just write /ja/ as
|ja| or |ya| or even |ia|?

As for stress marking:  As long as you don't want a stressed /8/,
you're fine, just use acutes.  You could even keep |¨| for pre-
palatalisation and define |´| + |¨| =: |^|.

Otherwise, you'd have to improvise.  If you use |y| for /8/, you
could denote stress with the diaeresis, since it can be placed on
|y|: |ÿ|.  I hear PCs can also put acutes onto |y|, but Macs can't.
Finally, you can put acutes and hats onto just about all of the
above-mentioned symbols with Unicode, but be advised that it doesn't
turn out nice on all platforms.

Yet another possibility would be to use digraphs for stressed
letters, e.g. |Conii|.



-- Christian Thalmann

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