Re: A BrSc a?
| From: | Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, April 25, 2002, 19:52 |
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At 2:16 am +0100 25/4/02, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
>
>With brevity as the overriding goal, the best option would
>be the unwritten vowel one. Maybe something like this:
But brevity is _not_ the overriding goal, otherwise I'd probably finish up
with something very 'Linish'. Lin, of course, does have the 'unwritten
vowel' which, not surprisingly, is shwa. Indeed, Dutton made much, tho not
consistent, use of shwa for single-consonant words. It was one of things I
found unattractive about Speedwords.
>aeiou = vowels
>bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz = consonants
>all syllables are CV
>a sixth vowel is unwritten
>a 22nd consonant (a glottal stop, say) is unwritten
Dutton made us of an "unwritten: consonant to avoid two adjacent vowels; in
his case he chose [j]
>the unwritten vowel and unwritten consonant cannot occur
> adjacent to each other (this would tend to mean that
> there would be either no orthographic C-final words
> or no orthographic V-initial words)
>
>The result makes every combination of letters licit and
>pronounceable. The phonotactics are an IAL-friendly CV
>pattern.
While the CV pattern may be IAL-friendly (and all incarnations of BrSc have
had this pattern), I am not persuaded that all the consonants and the
'unwritten' vowel would be 'IAL-friendly' - What will you do with the usual
'rogues' {c}, {q} and {x}? One person on this list has argued strongly in
the past that the glottal stop is not "IAL-friendly".
>There are (22 * 6) -1 = 131 syllables.
Yep - but if brevity were the overriding goal, then surely I'd follow
Srikanth and use the upper case letters as well, which would give (43 *
11)-1 = 472 syllables.
But the main drawbacks, as I see it, with such a scheme are:
1. I must include phonemes which are not "IAL-friendly"
2. There is no 'self-segregation' of morphemes in such a scheme.
i.e. pushing brevity to its limits runs contrary to the other two goals of
BrSc.
That's the challenge of BrSc - to balance the three goals. :)
Ray.
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XRICTOC ANECTH
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