Re: A phonology

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003 02:06:26 -0400, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>Thomas Wier wrote:
>JS Bangs wrote:
>> > since /&/ is only supposed to occur in closed syllables.
>>
>> What about "yeah"?  This is /j&/ [j&:] for me.
>>
>Surely "yeah" is an exceptional form; I don't know where we ought to put it.
>Interjections and onomatopoeia, and sometimes personal names,  are allowed
>to violate phonological rules-- I guess I'd call yeah an interjection.
>Maybe yes-no words are allowed to violate too. (Austronesian *@q@ 'yes' has
>final open schwa, that doesn't occur otherwise.)
Is that typical of languages in general? It seems like that would be a cool
feature to include in a conlang. I know in Japanese you often see words
with a little "tsu" at the end of a word, which normally only comes before
stops and /s/, but also before /h/ in foreign names like "Bahha" (Bach).
But I haven't, at least recently, thought about including words with
atypical phonology in my langs. Now that I'm going back to fictional
languages for a while (Zireen languages and probably some "Elvish" and
Mizarian ones too in the long run), I could use some more naturalistic
features in my langs.

As often as these things come up, I decided it would make things simpler to
make a web page of how I pronounce English words, with sound samples.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/my-english.html

Here's my pronunciation of "yeah" /'jæ/ and "mm-hmm" /m'hm/ (one of the few
English words with a syllabic "m" in my speech):

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/mp3/yeah.mp3
http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/mp3/mm-hmm.mp3

>Us country boys say sheep go [b&::], but it's [bA:] for Yalies....
Hmm... I think I'd say /'bæ/ in most contexts, but /'ba/ in the nursery
rhyme "Baa baa black sheep". The past tense (if used as a verb) is always
/'bad/ (no doubt to avoid confusion with "bad" /'bæd/).

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/mp3/baaed.mp3

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