Re: simple phonology

On Sun, 2 Jan 2005 22:04:33 +0200, Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> wrote:

>On Jan 2, 2005, at 8:48 AM, Philip Newton wrote:
>> Arabic has only three distinctive vowels, as far as I know. (This is
>> one reason why I consider it rather a pain to write non-Arabic
>> languages in the Arabic writing system.)
>
>Arabic has six:
>/a/ /i/ /u/
>/a:/ /i:/ /u:/
>Each vowel has a wide variety of realizations, depending on the
>surrounding consonants.
The distinction of long and short consonants may be considered a
suprasegmental feature of the syllable, so that the number of vowels would
remain three. This is done often in the analysis of German.

Maybe it makes less sense in Arabic since in the Germanic languages, vowel
length and consonant length mostly depend on each other (if there are long
consonants at all), whereas in Arabic I think they're independent from each
other. I don't really know whether this argument may be decisive in this point.


>I've been working on an Arabic orthography for English that makes use
>of Arabic emphatic and non-emphatic consonants in order to mark the
>vowels as different English vowels.
>For example:
>( />/ = emphatic)
>
>|bat| = /bEt/ "bet"
>|bat>| = /bVt/ "butt"
>|ba:t| = /b&t/ "bat"
>|ba:t>| = /bat/ "bot"
>
>When none of the necessary consonants have an emphatic equivalent, I
>just throw in an |`ayn| /3/ instead.
What an excellent trick! I've also thought about using the emphatic vs.
non-emphatic signs to mark vowel distinctions in the western languages, but
I could never work around the lack of that opposition in many sounds. I'll
have to experimentalize with this great idea of yours. Very interesting!

I hope the words won't get too long.

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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