[relay] Spoken/Written Versions?

[Trying to bring this thread back to CONLANG, since it seems to be more
interesting and more appropriate.]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 12:27:10AM +0200, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> amber@ojnk.net wrote:
> >
> > In a sick sort of way, this makes me feel good... because I have the exact
> > same problem. :)  I don't want to say that the way I pronounce my languages
> > is the way native speakers do, because it would be a very sad lot of native
> > speakers if that's the case. ;)
>
> Like Chris Wright, I make sure that Obrenje doesn't contain any
> sounds that I can't pronounce (though I'm pretty sure I still don't
> unround my /M/s consistently ;).  I can read Obrenje quite fluently,
> despite its non-trivial orthography.
[snip]

I can read Ebisedian quite well, too. But, not being a person who speaks a
lot, I find that when I actually read it out loud it doesn't quite turn
out as I expected.

The trickiest part of Ebisedian is the rounded vowels _w_ and _y_ ([u"]
and [y]). _y_ isn't that hard, since Mandarin, my L2, has _y_. But it gets
tricky when the unrounded equivalents _3_ and _i_ are in the immediate
vicinity. Lately, I've been slacking into pronouncing _w_ as [w@] instead
of [u"].

Sometimes I get _3_ and _e_ ([V"] and [&]) mixed as well, and occasionally
_0_ and _o_ ([A] and [o]), especially when they are short. For consonants,
the glottal fricative and velar fricative are hard to pronounce
distinctively.

But overall, when I planned the phonology, I made sure that I can at least
marginally pronounce all the sounds. I can actually speak Ebisedian on the
fly, albeit slowly. (One of my stubborn ideals is that I must be fluent or
semi-fluent in Ebisedian; I would not develop it overly fast such that I
have to consult grammars and lexica all the time.)


T

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