Re: An aesthetic question

Hi Shreyas!

At 06:46 AM Tuesday 6/5/01, you wrote:
>Okay, I have a problem.
>
>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. <snip>
>
>Also, what effect do these have on adjacent consonants?  I'm starting to
>see a possibility of surrounding nasality turning voiced stops into nasals
>and that sort of thing.
I think you have the beginnings of a nice solution here. Given the tendency
of nasal vowels to fall, one could imagine speaker making the phonemic
distinctions clearer by tending to transfer the nasalization to the
following sound for the higher vowel in each pair that might be confused.
Maybe something like

i~ > i + ~
e~ > e~
a~ > a~
o~ > o~
u~ > u + ~

So that, for example (sorry, I don't know what would be realist words in
Nrit), a pair like mi~pa / me~pa would become mimpa (or even mima) and
me~pa, or to~a / tu~a would become to~a, tuna. This might or might not be
reflected in the orthography of the language.

Cheers, Tom


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom Tadfor Little            tom@telp.com
Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA)
Telperion Productions        www.telp.com
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