How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...>
Date: 23-Feb-2007 03:52
Subject: Re: How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")
To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>



On 23/02/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
>
>
> Orthography: I'm a little stymied by orthographical problems, too.
>
Two^H^H^Hthree^H^H^H^H^Hfour! things I forgot to mention:

1. I'm looking for a way to represent the unvoiced dental fricative T, the
velar stop N, the glottal and uvular stops, various palatals (as opposed to
palatalised consonants) and maybe several retroflex consonants such as
retroflex t. The way I see it:

 I have a choice of thorn, theta and edh for T; enye (The "Spanish n") and
eng would seem to be logical choices for the palatal and velar stops,
respectively, and maybe an underline would do for the retroflex consonants?
Does anyone have more than rhotic, and if so, how do you represent it?

The main problem I see is that C could become seriously overloaded: one
system I have considered using involves "c" for /ts/, c-caron for /tS/,
c-dot for the palatal plosive and c-cedilla for the palatal fricative; does
anyone (else) think this could be seriously confusing? I am open to using
"x" for the velar or uvular fricative, but whichever I represent with it,
what about the other, and what could I use to avoid writing "ks" at the end
of words?

As far as possible I should like to resist the "Klingon approach" of using
capital letters to denote separate sounds, as this is orthographically ugly
(as one can imagine, a beautiful orthography was no issue in the
transcription of Klingon!). I don't object to using q and Q, (respectively
for the glottal and uvular stop) though, for some reason (!). (If you want
to persuade me, attempt to persuade me that this will increase the
orthographic similarity to Bantu, hint!)

I would also like to be able to use some single letters for affricates (the
ones I envisage using are /ts/ /tS/ /tT/ /cC/ and maybe /kx/ /qX/. Any
ideas?

2. I'm toying with the idea of getting rid of Finnish's neutral vowels and
adding /M/ and /7/, and maybe /E/ /V/ and some variation on /@/ (all in
X-SAMPA) as well. How about u-tilde, o-tilde (as in Estonian and Voro), and
e-umlaut for /@/? If you have /E/ and /V/ in your language, how do you
represent them?

3. Tone: I'm also toying with tone. I have an idea that I could use an acute
accent for high tone on vowels w/o umlauts, and a circumflex for high tone
on vowels w/ umlauts - but what if, instead of two-tone (high and low)
system, I want to have a three-tone (high, mid, and low) or more complicated
system? I'm intending to use a tone transcription like that of Vietnamese,
in which one writes the tone of the lexeme in isolation, without accounting
for down-drift, etc. (Tones like "high-falling, "rising" are present, but
only on syllables w/ long vowels/diphthongs, and therefore can easily be
accommodated by writing a different accent/tone mark on each vowel.)

4. Oh, and I almost forgot, Vallian has /consonant gradation/! I always miss
this in descriptions of Quenya, and I'm learning Finnish, so (especially
since I've never seen a conlang w/ consonant gradation before) I put it in
Vn! It's a lot more complicated that F, though, and somewhat inspired by
Saami, et al.; whereas F has grades like:

pp ~ p
mp ~ mm
p ~ v

for stops, Vn also grades all geminate consonants (to single) and sequences
of consonant + j/k/v to palatalised/aspirate/labialised consonants:

ll ~ l
tj ~ ty
pk ~ ph
rv ~ rw

As Vn lacks /d/, the well-known alternation t ~ d becomes t ~ r, as in some
F dialects; also, Vn abhors sequences of rhotic + vowel (+ vowel) and rhotic
(and some other combinations), so before -V(V)r, t- changes to T- instead of
-r-

Finally, unlike in F, where s + stop prevents consonant gradation, in Vn /s/
does NOT stop gradation; since combinations like /sr/ are as impossible in
Vn as in F, however, when -st- gradates, it undergoes (depending on dialect)
assimilation to -ss-, metathesis to -rs-, or metathesis or -ts-.

Jeff

PS As an aside: I've talked about palatalised, prenasalised, labialised, and
aspirated consonants; Wikipedia reports that there are also languages which
have post-nasalised (bn) and pre- and post-stopped nasals (pn, mp). I'm not
aware of any language that uses pre-palatalised or pre-labialised
consonants. Anyone? Also, are there any languages that use pre-fricativized
consonants?

I.e., given a language in which "pam" could be a word, but not "pram"
(because of a restriction on consonant clusters in initial position) are
languages any words in which "spam" could be a word, despite the
aforementioned restriction, due to pre-fricativized consonants?

Jeff


--
Now, did you hear the news today?
They say the danger's gone away
But I can hear the marching feet
Moving into the street

Adapted from Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

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