Con-phonologies (was: Zaik! (Hi there!) - Description of Lyanjen)

At 1:38 am -0500 31/8/00, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>> At 12:54 pm -0400 30/8/00, John Cowan wrote:
>> >On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>> >
>> >> <c> for /S/ does have precedents -- Onondaga uses that.  There are no
>> >> conlangs AFAIK that do that, however.
>> >
>> >Lojban and Loglan do: "c" = /S/, "j" = /Z/.
>>
>> Yiklamu and Vorlin also use "c" and "j" the same was.  Didn't Ro also use
>> the symbols that way?  I was under the impression - maybe mistakenly - that
>> this was not an uncommon practice among north American conlangers.
>
>Oh, it may be.
Not something I'd argue over - may just be a co-incidence that I've noticed
it more in conlangs whose authors are north American.  There are so many
conlangs out there that I cannot claim I've seen all.

>I had just completely forgotten about Lojban (although I never
>paid particular attention to the phonologies of auxlangs anyway, since
>they're usually so contrived).
I don't really see how they are, generally, more or less contrived than
other conlang, really.  I mean - aren't all conlangs to some extent
contrived?  And, surely, among conIALs we get all sorts of phonologies just
as among other sorts of conlangs?

There's Esperanto which so clearly relects the Slavic phonology familiar to
its inventor; but then I've seen not a few other conlangs whose phonology
similarly reflects that of its inventor's L1.

We have the quaintly naive (IM0) phonology of Volapük; similarly there are
not a few other conlangs with quaint phonologies.

We have the carefully thought out phonology of a professional linguist in
Novial (the 1938/31 version); and certainly there are conlangs (e.g.
Quenya, Sindarin, Tepa et alia) with carefully thought out phonologies.

And we have the original, one could say 'experimental', phonology of
SolReSol; similarly there are interesting, experimental phonologies among
other types of conlangs.

As it must be obvious to readers of the list, phonology is one of my more
obvious interests; I am always interested to look at the phonology of _any_
conlang.  Often I'm disappointed; but there have been (and are) unexpected
surprises among, I think, all genre of conlangs.

But, in truth, the only language mentioned above that was constructed
specifically as an IAL was Ro.

Lojban & Loglan were constructed, as I understand it, primarily as
languages based on predicate logic as part of an experiment to test the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; Voksigid was also an attempt to devise a language
on the same principal.  I know some lojban advocates do also say that it
_could_ be used as an IAL - but then so, in theory, could any conlang
(IMHO Quenya, e.g., wouldn't be a bad candidate).  I'm quite sure, however,
that Bruce Gilson, the instigator of the Voksigid project, would not
advocate Voksigid as an IAL (his preference has long been for "reformed
Novial").

Vorlin is not an IAL, at least not in the traditional sense.  Indeed, its
author, Rick Harrison, has spoken out against the conIAL fraternity.  And
Yiklamu most certainly is not an IAL.  I can just imagine Mark Line's
reaction to any suggestion that it was  :)

Ray.





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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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