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Re: Yes, another sketch for a new conlang! [very very long!]

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 18, 2000, 16:11
At 10:10 18/01/00 -0500, you wrote:
> >IMO, it's a bit different. Imagine another foreigner insisting that her >name is Claire (let her be French, clearly pronouncing the final /R/). >If the language allows /kle-/ and /-er/, it seems that nothing prevents >the speakers from pronouncing /kler/. > >I read in some paper that the Chinese (speaking Putonghua) can easily >pronounce syllables like *yai* which cannot appear in native words (while >indeed, they have no way to record such syllables in the traditional >writing). The reason is that both ya- and -ai are possible. >
OK, now I see what you mean.
>On the other hand, it seemed to me that surface sequences of that kind must >be generated by the elision. What do you obtain from kle#'er ? >
Let me see... With the new rules, I have: kle#'er -> kle#er -> klr -> klr= Sequences of liquids and/or vowels are simplified, with only the frontier liquids/vowels staying.
>But I agree it's O.K. with iL and uL. This simply means that on the >surface no sequences like -iL and -uL are permitted in the end of a >syllable. This ban looks plausible. >
With my new ordering of rules, those sequences just cannot appear as the syllabification of the liquids is a rule that happens after the simplification of vowel/liquid clusters.
>>> >> /J/ is an affricate, /j/ is an approximant. /J/ has thus a more >>"consonnantic" value. > >Affricate or fricative? >
Fricative of course, sorry, my mistake...
>I forgot to ask: is j_O different from ç < xj ? (I can imagine that, but >I'd like it clearly stated). >
Yes, even if those two sounds are very near. Just like /J/ is a voiced palatal fricative and /j/ a voiced palatal approximant, /C/ is a voiceless palatal fricative and /j_0/ a voiceless palatal approximant. I may have dialects without the difference, as it is a tricky one :) .
> >IMO, Hawaiian (Tahitian, and the like) are not a good example. When you >have less than 10 consonants and no clusters at all, the system can be >very asymmetrical, and individual gaps in distribution need no special >justification. But in richer consonant systems both sounds and >distribution gaps tend to form rows, and gaps not justified by the whole >system are often filled in. > >My concern was not about the absence of the opposition, but rather about >too complex distribution of allophones, which AFAIK tend to phonematize >in such cases. >
True, but I'm describing only one stage of the language. Maybe it can evolve later with phonematization of the allophones.
>> its name will certainly be Itakian by the way :) > >Congrats! Now I know what we're talking about ;) ! >
:)
>>> >> But the type of bans I have are not like that, they were badly >explained >>but create a very stable phonetic distribution of phones. > >I'm really curious to see what the distribution rules will look like! >
I will show you in my next post about Itakian. But I can tell you it goes well in rows and columns :) .
> >Most borrowings are nouns, or verbs with the standard -zuru/-suru suffix. >So their stems do not undergo any changes, as Japanese noun morphology >is very transparent. > >The situation in Itakian, with its complex morphonology, may be different. >Regular derivation should work for borrowings as well... but this partly >depends on how the morphology is designed. >
I'm thinking of using it to make interesting borrowings: the speakers of Itakian hear a word, and take it to the surface representation of a word or series of words, and write what they think is the deep phonemic representation of it :) .
> >For Japanese, "confined" does not seem the right word... > >A bit earlier it experienced a similar story with /p/, and at a still >earlier stage, it acquired word-initial voiced obstruents and /r/ the same >way. Plus a lot of sounds that *mainly* appear in borrowings (final /N/, >palatalized, etc.). All these now appear in huge number of morphemes, >including pronominal stems, numerals, productive affixes, and so on. >
As far as I know, all these come from the massive amount of borrowing from Chinese, which are now so old that they appear inside the grammatical system of Japanese.
>Most European languages are no better, though. Quite usual thing, in fact. >But not necessarily applicable to Itakian ;). >
:) Christophe Grandsire |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G. "Reality is just another point of view." homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org