Re: Tones to make up for lack of phonemes

The problem is that you can only distinguish so many tones. Most of your words
would be very, very long. Why not /p/, /b/, /m/ and /a/, /i/, /u/,
and distinguish your vowels not just by tone but also by length?
 
"Define 'cynical'."-M. Mudd
 
 




________________________________
From: Matthew Turnbull <ave.jor@...>
To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
Sent: Friday, December 26, 2008 11:55:43 PM
Subject: Re: Tones to make up for lack of phonemes

I would think that any thing that had a throat could do a glottal
stop, or some sort of equivalent "hiatus" phoneme. Also, you don't
even need vocal cords to generate tones, if you have never
investigated the vocal physiology of avians, I highly suggest doing
so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrinx_(biology)

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Vincent Pistelli <pva003@...> wrote:
> I was going to include 2 vowels: a & i      I was only talking about the
> consonants of the language.
>
> On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 8:16 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>wrote:
>
>> SolReSol was a musical language based on the Western scale.
>> Presumably that would fit the bill.  Also, why not just a vowel
>> for your phoneme?  Not all creatures can make a [b]; just about
>> all of them can cry.
>>
>> -David
>> *******************************************************************
>> "A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
>> "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
>>
>> -Jim Morrison
>>
>> http://dedalvs.free.fr/
>>
>> On Dec 26, 2008, at 6∞12 PM, Vincent Pistelli wrote:
>>
>>  I want to make a language that has just the bare minimum of phonemes,
>>> preferably ones that anything with vocal cords can pronounce.  I was
>>> thinking just bilabial stops with a bunch of tones to make up for major
>>> lack
>>> of phonemes, but that would require a really good ear. Do any of you know
>>> any other phonemes that could theoretically be pronounced by anything with
>>> a
>>> mouth, vocal cords, and a capacity speak and understand language?
>>>
>>
>