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Re: One consonant short.

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Sunday, October 3, 2004, 21:11
(Sorry, this went straight to Glenn first.  (Glenn, your mail client
sets a "reply-to" header - if you can disable that, it'd make
participation in this list more convenient.))

Glenn Alexander wrote at 2004-10-03 22:16:05 (+1000)
 > Hi again everyone,
 >
 > my alphabet, at:
 >
 > http://www.shoalhaven.net.au/~glenalec/link/letters.html
 >
 > has been changed a little after feedback from the list.
 >
 > I merged the th/dh sound into f/v
 >
 > I also re-aranged the voiced/unvoiced preferences to always prefer
 > unvoiced. No reason, just felt like it ;-)
 >
 > I'm down to 11 consonants, which is one less than I'd really
 > like. Any non-english consonants markedly different to what I have
 > up that I am not aware of? (Probably not counting clicks and
 > whistles, and I've decided to keep h and shwa on the same symbol.)
 >

Even within the phonology of English, you don't have a velar nasal
(final consonant of "sing").  Have you already rejected that for some
reason?

Otherwise... well, there's a wide variety, even without making a
phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced sounds.  It's
difficult to say what would be most "markedly different", though.
Velar fricative (final consonant of Bach, in German)?  Uvular
fricative (French "r")?  Maybe a glottal stop (a little difficult for
an English speaker to distinguish from zero in initial or final
position).  Alveolar lateral fricative (found in Welsh and many native
American languages)?

Listen to some of the samples of the pulmonic consonants at
 http://www.ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ipachart_cons_pulm.html

I'm not sure exactly what your objectives are here, but you might
find the following essay by Rick Morneau on choosing phonemes for an
artificial language useful:
 http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/phonology.html

Reply

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>