Re: CHAT: An introduction

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 03:44:29 -0500, Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> wrote:

>Paul Bennett wrote:
>> Thomas Wier wrote:
>> > Welcome. Question about Koba: is /a/ really phonologically a front
>> > vowel? If so, that would be rather marked, given there is no low back
>> > vowel counterpart. (By no means impossible, however.)
>>
>> It's not *that* marked, is it? A lot of languages have only one low vowel.
>> Many Romance languages spring immediately to mind, among what feels
>> instinctively like a fair number more.
>
>That's a different question.  You are of course correct that many
>-- in fact, I'd guesstimate between 30% and 40% -- languages have only
>one low vowel.  But the question was how that vowel gets phonologically
>encoded.  In almost all the systems I've seen or heard about, the one
>low vowel in such languages behaves as a back vowel (e.g. for purposes of
>back harmony).  Phonetically, it's usually not very back, but that's
>another issue altogether.
Erm... so does it need editing at all?

I worked on the phonology of Koba right after I finished with Rafenio's
phonology, so the idea of a front vowel probably stuck. I was also looking
at Romance languages and Japanese, which have [a].

Ben