Re: "Newbie"

Quoting Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>:

> --- Marty Rosenberg <TheFlamingDrake@...> wrote:
>
>
> <snip>
>
> > * This is an approximation; I can't figure out
> > how to properlyrepresent sounds in SAMPA, so
> > I'm sticking with familiarrepresentations here.
>
> Here's my take on pronunciation in a conlang.  I KNOW
> I'm going to get tons of people who disagree but here
> goes anyway.
You're prescient, Gary ...

> Pronunciation is the least important aspect of any
> language.  The English speaker from Bombay can get
> together with his friend from London and their mutual
> friends from Tennesee and Boston.  Not one of them
> will pronounce a single vowel in the same way, and
> will pronounce a number of consonants quite
> differently too.  Yet in spite of the fact that their
> pronunciation is not even remotely similar, they
> understand each other perfectly well.
That's not the point. The point is that you get, if English were your conlang,
to device their respective pronunciations in exhaustive detail!

IMHO, designing the phonemics and phonetics is one of the main joys of
creating a conlang. And when you just cannot decide if /e:/ ought to be
realized as [e:] or [e@] in stressed position, you just decree there are some
dialects that do the one, and some the other.

> My first "big" conlang specifically stated that in the
> conculture that went along with it the language was a
> global one spoken with many different accents around
> the world, and so the whole notion of "correct"
> pronunciation was simply non-existent.
I tend to focus on the "official" or "standard" version of my conlangs, but
that some lack a such does not mean I do not focus on a single variety. Eg,
Kalini Sapak is spoken by a number of nomadic tribes that have no central
authorities; nonetheless, my work is concentrated on a particular (unnamed)
variant. Locking down this variant's pronunciation of _aywal_ as [e:'wal] is
useful, since it allows me to say there's other dialects that have [E:'wal]
(less strong assimilation) and [2:'wal] (further assimilation). (Don't worry
if you don't understand the phonetic transcriptions - the point is that
they're different.)

> My pronunciation rule, and this applies to all my own
> conlangs, is simply to pronounce it in whatever way
> seems reasonable.  If the language wants every vowel
> to be pronounced (which mine usually do) then "kane
> tikariu niwalu" can be pronounced somewhere in the
> general neighborhood of "KAH-nay tee-KAH-ree-oo
> nee-WAH-loo" and be perfectly acceptable.
This brings us to a whole 'nother field; orthography. Some conlangers,
reputedly, are so unconcerned with it that they do all their conlanging
directly in the IPA. Others spend untold hours developing orthographies so
complex as to make English and Tibetan seem like wonders of phonemicity and
simplicity - Christophe Grandisre and his Magel comes to mind.

Myself, I'm rather middle-of-the-road here. I usually do my conlanging in
romanization, being to lazy to use or even invent the native scripts. The
orthographies tend to be quite regular, altho not all are trivial. The one I'm
the most pleased with is perhaps Steienzh's - it started out as
a "transplation" of Tairezazh's to a closely related language, but it evolved
a host of complications in the process. It even has quite a few silent 'e's,
fortunately not were anglophones would tend to expect them.

                                                      Andreas