Re: Personal langs and converse of aux

>I wasn't exposed to it in childhood, and my tongue tip doesn't seem very
>limber.  I can do a continued uvular flap, but I can't sustain the
>quasi-trill I produce more than a second or two.  Practice.  :-)
Yoon Ha, you can do a uvular flap?!?  I can do a uvular trill (having
learnt French briefly and stopped, I practiced the fricative in odd moments
and then one day in Phonetics class realised that I'd overshot) but I
certainly can't flap or tap back there!

Brian: there are some tones that are harder for me than others.  I almost
never hit the true Mandarin tone 3 - which is
mid-falling-rising-to-high.  I think I substitute a low tone for it, like
most Singaporean Mandarin speakers - H. S. Teoh, do Malaysians do this
too?  Your dialect of Hokkien was a little different from mine (high rising
tone instead of high falling!!!).

I also have major trouble distinguishing the Cantonese tones.  They have
three level tones (high, mid, low-mid) and one very low falling tone that
sounds to me like a fourth level tone.  And then they distinguish between
high rising and low rising.  [chuckle]  When I did my tonal
migrated-to-southern-China Indo-European language, I found myself including
a contrast between high falling and low falling that I couldn't possibly
have distinguished consistently in real life ...

But I don't know if this is the kind of thing anyone would want to put into
a personal auxlang that they'll try to teach their kids ... um, how do I
put this?  When I briefly tried to learn Vietnamese, I could hear the high
level tone fine, and the rising tone, but the other tones didn't correspond
exactly to the tonal contrasts that I used natively, so I had as much
trouble with them as anyone else in the class.  Like if you have [p] and
[b] in English, it would still take you a while to adjust to hearing
Mandarin [ph] and [p], and you'd still have major trouble with Hokkien
[ph], [p] and [b].  I guess what I'm trying to say is, just having tone in
an auxlang isn't going to help your kids learn tone in all tonal languages,
though I guess it would help.  Just curious, are you planning to
incorporate tone into your conlang at all?  It sounds like a bit of a
headache what with all the other difficult sounds that might be more useful!

E-Ching