Re: THEORY: language and the brain [Interesting article]

Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>:

> Its pretty bad! Lets list the faults: Irregular stress (is that a
> problem for people whose L1 has regular stress, Christophe? anyone?) A
> massive number of vowel sounds (although less than some of the other
> Germanic Languages I think)
That depends how you're counting, I suspect. Remember the thread about how
many vowels English has?

[snip]
>  Although when you think of it esperanto is as bad if we're looking at
> phonology... I don't think I'd try to design the next international
> language even if I wanted to be an auxlanger because to be honest making
> a language which is easy to use takes all the fun out of it.
Time to make an anti-IAL - a language to stop international communication thru
mutual incomprehension. My starting tip: throw out vowels.

                                                       Andreas

> >Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>:
> >
> >
> >
> >>I've been thinking about it and I've found more examples of
> >>contrasting
> >>s and z than I expected, but I still think its a less important
> >>distinction than pronouncing T different from f and t, and D different
> >>from d or v. I'm often amazed that people can learn to speak english
> >>as
> >>well as they can, thinking of the number of new sounds speakers of
> >>some
> >>languages have to learn to distinguish. I think that english is
> >>probably
> >>very badly chosen as an international language given the large number
> >>of
> >>sounds it uses... I'm not sure what would be as acceptable and better
> >>though (after all, most people like english because they, or their
> >>teachers, think it will be useful for business purposes).
> >>
> >>
> >
> >I think the first thing English needs is a human-readable orthography! :-)
> >
> >But English's phonemic inventory isn't to terrible, is it? Sure, it's got
> [T]
> >and [D], and a messy vowel system, but it could be so much worse. It
> could've
> >had a couple dozen clicks, or full series of velarized and palatalized
> >consonants, four-way voicing and aspiration contrasts, or umpteen
> distinctive
> >contour tones with massive tone sandhi. Or all of that combined with
> Georgioid
> >consonant clusters and full complements of nasalized and creaky-voiced
> vowels.
> >And phonemic voiceless nasals.
> >
> >                                                              Andreas
> >
> >
> >
>

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