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[relay] Spoken/Written Versions?

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Friday, May 31, 2002, 23:42
[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 -- MS Windows: 32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition.