Re: [IE conlangs]

At 19:02 08/04/99 -0700, you wrote:
>As a non-linguist, and especially a non-phonologist, I wonder at all the
>infinitesimal distinctions that are made concerning vowel sounds. English as
>spoken in London, New Jersey, Bombay, and by people with any one of a number
>of different "foreign" accents are all radically different in terms of the
>exact nature of the vowel sounds.  Yet each of these variations can be
>easily understood by most English speakers.  Such subtle nuances of
>pronunciation seem, therefore, to have exactly zero information content.
>(Other than to identify the nationality of the speaker.)
>
>English, at least, would appear to be very tolerant of variety in vowel
>sounds.  Are other languages this tolerant, or are there languages in which
>slight mispronunciations would confuse the meaning of a sentence?
>
>My own pet theory is that vowels sounds are important, but only just barely.
>(My own conlang, Tazhi, is set in a parallel world where it is a global
>language
>with many local variations in pronunciation which are all ultimately
>unimportant.)
>
>Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is that it seems to me that any
>candidate for a global language must be a some language which is extremely
>tolerant of various types of "mispronunciation".  How do languages other
>than English stack up in this regard?
>
>--Gary.
>
>
        It depends greatly on the amount of vowels the language has, and in how it
uses it. Languages which have only one, two or three vowels are generally
more tolerant than many-vowel languages, where a slight change in one vowel
would bring to make it resemble another already existing in the language.
But it is not always true.

        For example, Arabic, which has only 3 (a, i, u) vowels which serve only
for grammatical purposes allow much variation, and the a is often rendered
[e], the u [o], etc... But it is difficult to have a real idea of what's
tolerable and what's not. Russian and Spanish (or is it Russian and
Italian, I don't remember -in any case, my point is still true-), for
example, have the same vowel distribution, but where Russian is very
tolerant and allows much variation, Spanish (Castillan Spanish I mean) is
very strict and disallows variation.

        As you can see, it is always difficult to say something general about
languages. You often find a language that doesn't fit into what you said.

                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html