Re: Vocab #5

On 1 May 02, at 20:41, Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- In conlang@y..., Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@G...> wrote:
>
> [SNIP: Verdurian]
>
> Nice phonology you've got there.  The /q/ seems to be a bit out of
> place, but the rest fits together nicely.
Thanks ;) It's not my language, though; Verdurian is Mark Rosenfelder's
baby. Start at http://www.zompist.com/verdurian.htm ; phonology is at
http://www.zompist.com/phonology.htm . I do have some information at
http://shavian.org/verdurian/ , but it's mostly tools such as
conjugation utilities for some of his languages (and a history of
posting to Mark's message board).

(And note that there's a uvular /R/ to go with the uvular /q/. Oh, and
the dirty secret as to why |k| stands for /q/ is found in Mark's
Language Construction Kit -- look at
http://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html#alphabet where it says in the last
paragraph "You'll also notice both c and k in the alphabet. This is the
sort of ethnocentrism it's all too easy to fall into. Why would another
language duplicate the convoluted history of our alphabet's c and k?
I've reinterpreted these symbols to refer to /k/ and /q/." So I suppose
the transliteration came first and the phonology came afterwards.)

> > dobrä chaa,
> > /do"bra: "tSaa/
>
> Is there a phonemic distinction between /a:/ and /aa/?  Does the
> pitch or stress drop during /"a.a/ but not in /a:/?
I'll have to get back to you on that one... I asked Mark once but I
can't find his answer right now. It's probably in my mailbox at work.

Short answer: I believe they're pronounced the same. However, |ä| is
always stressed (as are the other vowels which are transliterated with
umlaut -- "lenge" in the original script --, |ë| |ö| |ü|), while |aa|
is not necessarily so.

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>