Re: New Conlang: S4

On Thursday, October 4, 2001, at 05:15 AM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> These are some impressions from my new Conlang, which does not yet
> have a name.  The working title is S4.
>
JOOC, what inspired the name?  :-)

> In short:
>    - extreme amount of consonant phonemes
>
>      Currently over 700 including 150 click phonemes.  The vast
>      majority are plosives, fricatives and affricates (modifiers:
>      nasalised, aspirated, pharyngealised, length, voice, etc.)
>
Wow!  That's going to be a !@#$ to transcribe.  Perhaps some sort of
grid-construction...?

>    - monosyllabic stems
>
> I wanted to adapt Arabic triconsonantal roots to this, but my roots
> are too short: only one consonant phoneme.  But still, because of the
> extreme amount of consonants, instead of inserting a second vowel,
> stems can be derived from roots by modifying features and the position
> of articulation.  Roots are restricted to two positions for clicks and
> three positions for other phonemes, while stems may use all five
> positions of clicks and all ten positions for other phonemes.
>
Neat!  Challenging, but neat!  (Then again, I'm sure there are languages
with ungodly nubmers of consonants, or ungodly numbers of vowels, or
ungodly numbers of anything, from this poor English-speaker's point of
view.)  I really like the idea of mostly-systematic offsets encoded in
your table (-2, -1, 0, +1).

> This is the table:
>
> root pos.     |              stem position
>               | -2       | -1         | 0         | +1
> --------------+----------+------------+-----------+---------------------------
> alv.click     | bilabial | dental     | alveolar  | alveolopalatal
> lateral click | alveolar | alv.pal    | lateral   | lateral
> +postaspiration
> alveolar      | labial   | dental     | alveolar  | postalveolar
> uvular        | palatal  | velar      | uvular    | pharyngeal
> -postaspiration
> glottal       | uvular   | epiglottal | glottal   | alveolar
> +postaspiration
>
Sorry for the ignorance--I know what aspiration is, but what is
postaspiration, and is there also a corresponding pre-aspiration?

> What do you think?  Lexicon lookups will be aweful I suppose!  HAHAHA!
>
> **Henrik
>
> PS: I'm affraid I promised to make and read a poem in this new
>     language to a friend.  My goodness...  Practice...
>
<laugh>  Best wishes...

YHL

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