Re: News and a phonology or two...

Welcome back.

>(is r`_r the same as j\ ? I'm not sure.  Maybe it's the same as j\_a ?)
They might be close, but probably not the same.  The first (r`_r) involves
retroflexion; the other (j\) is not.

>Is it wildly unrealistic for a human (IE) lang to have all four pairs
>/s/,/z/ /S/,/Z/ /s`/,/z`/ and /C/,/j\/ as separate phonemes?
Unlikely but not impossible at all.  I reckon certain Caucasian languages
may have all eight.

>Vowels:
>As yet undecided.  Probably either simply i,a,u or somewhere around 15-20
>vowels.  Depends how confident I feel describing vowels phonetically...
>(usually not very!)
It's best to build like this: start with the basic vowel triangle of i-a-u.
Fill in the spaces: i-e-a-o-u, with y (high central unrounded or rounded)
between i and u.  That's six so far.  Or build a triangle of ten, arranged
like bowling pins:

i 1 } u  (and I'm using X-SAMPA like you are)
e @ o
  E O
   a

Then, make your back rounded vowels have front rounded counterparts, and
your front unrounded vowels should have back counterparts.  So ten becomes
sixteen when you add:

y     W  (X-SAMPA doesn't have the high back rounded vowel!)
2   7
  9 V

And the lowest vowel a could be fronted to { and backed to A or Q.  That's
eighteen vowels!  Tense-lax distinction makes up to 36, and that's not
counting short-long, oral-nasal and tones...

You'd be hard-pressed to find a natural language with over 20 vowel
qualities (but if you include *quantities*, that's a different tale to
tell).

Danny
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