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

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