Speedtalk. Again!

Hi,

Most of my conlangs are inspired by Speedtalk. Well three of them anyways.

The original, Ok, was largely created before I heard of this list.
I took a lot of liberties with the original idea as expressed by Heinlein. I
thought I had to. When I started Ok and was trying to stick closely to his
idea, I couldn't see how a collection of say, eight consonants could be
pronounced. I guess the solution is called epinthetic vowels?

Then, as I researched the possibility of language that uses a phoneme/word
relationship based on what I've discovered studying X-sampa, I see that the
language will be vowel heavy anyways. Heinlein suggests using all posible
variations of the phonemes. He 's talking about duration, labialization,
palitization, voicing, aspiration, tones etc etc etc. The vowels just have
more variations that can be applied to them.

The other issue is comprehension. The other day as I lay in bed with the
windows open, the next door neighbor was standing in her driveway talking to
her friend. She talks like a machinegun. Rapidfire monosyllables. I thought
"You know I can understand her perfectly" There really isn't much difference
in the way she speaks and the way someone would speak Speedtalk.

I just don't agree about Heinleins other idea that Speedtalk would be a more
logical language, better adapted to thought. I don't plan to try and achieve
that.

I think that in order to get the best use out of the phonemes at hand, I'll
use an isolating non-inflecting grammar, sort of like one finds in some
pidgins and some of the east asian languages: Tense implied by context.

I had already started this but I'm scrapping it and starting over. I'm going
to use X-sampa as the orthography. (the ascii version)

Any thoughts, hints, ideas, or flames? :)

-Duke

I think I've learned a lot from the people here.

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