Re: New to the list

Vasiliy/Basilius wrote:

>Hello, Oskar, and I second all greetings you've received!
Greetings, thank you thank you :)

>Interestingly, a couple weeks ago I lurked into AUXLANG and noticed
>your messages. I thought, at last they are busy with something
>interesting, like in-depth discussion of phonology... No, that didn't
>last long ;)
Phonology isn't all too popular there. The overwhelming majority of the "old
veterans" who post there are supporters of the various "Euro-clones" + one
Lojban supporter, and will try to trample any effort to bring a new,
"never-to-be-spoken-or-propagated-toy-IAL", into the discussion. I make my
IALs for my own enjoyment. I'm not socially disconnected enough to try to
influence people around me to speak some language they've never heard of.
  And you may have seen that when I tried to express my phonological
concerns, and in conjunction with that criticized Esperanto and most other
IALs for having too much archaic Western phonology, the reply was basically:
"I can't see what it matters, it has worked fine for more than a hundred
years..."

>On Fri, 16 Jun 2000 02:21:55 GMT, you wrote:
>
> > A more
> >modern spelling is "íslenskur maður", or, the way I want it,
>"íslenskur
> >madur".
>
>What happened to the encoding? You used too sign your messages
>ӳkar Gu졵gsson - and it's perfectly OK with me... Well, I mostly
>read (and post to) the list in http access (with encoding set to
>Western = ISO-8859-1), and there were complaints recently that some
>people don't see some characters in my posts :( . I can only guess
>that you meant _ͳlenskur (ͳlenzkur?) ma岟, but actually I see
>capital A-tilde instead of capital I-acute, and something
>undescribable instead of 'eth'...
In older spelling "íslenskur" was spelled with 'z', to indicate that the
dental (from 'land') were not pronounced. This was too complicated for many
to handle, so the 'z' was removed in the 70's (there's only one sibilant
phoneme in Icelandic, unvoiced alveolar /s/).
As to the special characters, it's even affecting me, for some reason. And
'eth' is the most redundant and stupid letter in the Icelandic alphabet, so
I sometimes write 'd' instead, in protest against it.

The reason why 'eth' ([D]) is redundant is that the Icelandic lenis plosive
phonemes function exactly like in (standard) Spanish; that is, intervocally
they get fricatized and retain the underlying voicing (the underlying
voicing is my own theory, not yet confirmed by other sources, scarce even
here). They are also fricatized in conjunction with some syllabics, though
they don't follow all the same patterns there, with /d/ generally being
"softened" more often. The orthography however, does not recognize this all
too well, having 'f' for fricatized /b/, 'ð' ('eth') for fricatized /d/,
and 'g' for /g/. Completely inconsistent and ignorant of the underlying
phonology.

> >Always flattering to see people exhibit interest in Icelandic. I'm
> >pretty objective as a linguist, but I'd still say that my own native
> >language has many interesting characteristics, mainly lexical.
>
>It has a lot of interesting features *everywhere*, I think! And some of
>us (me included) will want to consult with you a lot!
Nice. I'd admit, yes, that Icelandic phonology is also very interesting,
very smooth. Though not too many people here (in Iceland) are aware of the
beaty of its phonology, of course. The school system has a lot of propaganda
for Icelandic language, but the linguistics behind that are very obsolete,
Classical-type, prescriptive, orthographical over phonological. Annoys me a
lot.

>And from what I've seen of your phonological ideas... well, I suppose
>*variation* isn't a typical auxlanger's concern... auxlangers tend to
>be so prescriptive, and to make their constructs so strangely
>prohibitive for potential colloquial loans... Do they ever bother about
>such trifles as phonological problems with language contacts, including
>borrowed phonemes, violation of sound combinatorics, etc.? First things
>I'd think of, if I'd ever attempted at designing an IAL...
In fact, I'll readily admit that my "variation"-theme is simply admitting
something that already exists; consider the variations allowed in the
pronunciation of international English! What I'm trying to do, however, is
to take control of this variation, write it down and make it "legal". That
is, guide the speakers to the pronunciations that fit their speech the best,
and making sure that no variations will be harmful, i.e. confusing. The
ranges are designed so that most people should find something within each
that they can readily pronounce or at least very easily learn to pronounce.
And I don't think it's the pronunciation of each individual sound that has
always caused problems, it's more the _distinctions_ that need to be made.
So even if a language has, say, an alveolar trill, if there's no lateral for
it to be made distinct from, those who can't do the trill just pick the
lateral. Once distinctions must be made, people need to really start
pronouncing the evil sounds, you know what I'm saying? ;)

>Happy conlanging!
Thank you!

Oskar :)
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