Re: An aesthetic question

Shreyas wrote:

>In my conlang Nrit, all the five cardinal vowels can be nasalized.
>Now, this is bad, because I cannot comfortably pronounce nasal high vowels;
>they seem to want to fall to lower adjacent vowels.  It's also been
>observed that nasals tend to be lower anyway.
>
>So, do I simply allow the high vowels to have totally different quality
>when nasalized, or shall I conflate /i~/ and /e~/, as well as /o~/
>and /u~/?  This would reduce my vowel inventory from twenty to sixteen (a
>vowel can be long, nasal, both, or neither), which doesn't overjoy me, but
>does rather clean up my orthography. (And perhaps it gives me the
>opportunity to use e` and o` to mark long nasal i and u instead of i`i` and
  u`u`, though some would be irregularly spelled just for the fun of it.)

I say, from my own humble aestheic opinion, keep all the nasals, keep
practising the ones you're not yet adept at, and find some byzantine
way to cope in the orthography. Taiwanese has a whole slew of nasals
beyond the French repertoire I was accustomed to (I believe
Christophe said that /E~/ and /Y~/ are conflating, but I still have
/Y~/ -- hope that's perceived as an age thing), and it was great fun
playing with these new sounds. Love 'em.

In Géarthnuns, nasals are not phonemic, but do kick in when they
proceed an "ns" combination. Originally this was limited to a certain
class of nouns (e.g. "brins" /brI~s/ "key point, main idea", fearing
that if the "n" were fully realized, an interstitial "t" might be
heard, making it hard to distinguish from "brints" /brInts/
"chalice"), but the phenomenon has now spread throughout the entire
language where "n" and "s" come together. Anyway, that means that all
fourteen vowels can be nasalized:

/a~/    /aI~/
/u~/    /y~/
/I~/    /i~/
/Y~/    /o~/
/E~/    /e~/
/O~/    /aU~/
/YI~/   /oI~/

Some of these are higher frequency than others, and I don't know if
they've all been hit yet, but they're there for the using.

But in terms of Shreyas' lang, I also like Tom's suggestion.

Kou