Re: signal and noise in phonologies and scripts

Jörg Rhiemeier eskrë »

> Danny Wier is a list member who has the habit of posting yet another
> version of the phoneme inventory of his conlang Tech every few months.
> Apparently, he constantly revises the phonology and hardly gets
> beyond that.  The point is that his phoneme inventories are always
> *monstrous*, with more than 100 consonants, employing lots of
> secondary articulations, glottalization, aspiration and other features
> which would make all those phonemes hard to distinguish from each other.
>
> He rarely comments on other issues.
Sorry, Jörg: please don't think me rude, but that's not my recollection of
Danny, although it may be a fair comment about Tech's phonology.

Back in the dim and distant past when I was always on the list, Danny was a
regular and witty contributor to discussions. Tech was not his only
creation, either: he often had several projects on the go, most of them much
less monstrous than Tech (which was apparently influenced by his
manic-episode experiences). I hope he is now in good health.

Since these days my appearances on Conlang tend to consist of occasional
messages about my Jameld website, and little else, I may appear to be
unproductive. However, I feel that I have little to add to the discussion,
as despite my enthusiasm my knowledge of linguistics is scanty, albeit less
scanty than it used to be. Most of the time I stay offlist, because I simply
don't have the time to read so many messages.

On the plus side, I have finally found the time to document Jameld's grammar
in some detail - something I've been meaning to do for at least five years.
The Jameld Dictionary project is now nearly complete, at long last, so come
the new year I'll be documenting my old conlang Sevorian for the website,
and pondering how to celebrate Jameld's 20th anniversary next autumn.

James

 =========================================================================
james@zolid.com  James Campbell  Zeugma--Our Life Is Design  www.zolid.com
  Sponsored by zolid.com -- for all your household blithery requirements
 =========================================================================