Re: A phonology

Quoting Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>:

> Here's a phonology I thought up in connection with my state-based language
> idea (the one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, which has only one part of
> speech and one syntactical rule).
[...]

> Possible onset consonants consist of the nasals
> m       n       ng
> [m]     [n]     [N]
> and the approximants
> w       r       l       y       ll
> [w]     [4]     [l]     [j]     [5]
>
> Vowels
>
> Vowels are
> i       a       u
> [i]     [&]     [u]
Why [&] as the basic phone of /a/?  It's possible, but far more
common would be to have basic [a] or [A] with conditioned alternation
with [&].

> Coda consonants be any of the following stops
> p       b       t       d       c       gc      k       g       q       qh
> [p]     [b]     [t]     [d]     [c]     [J\]    [k]     [g]     [q]
> Or any of the fricatives
> ph      bh      þ       ð       sh      j       lh      x       gh      h
> [p\]    [b\]    [T]     [D]     [S]     [Z]     [K]     [x]     [G]     [h]
This is a very unnatural phonology.  Typically, any consonant
phoneme in a natural language will surface in word/syllable-initial
position (with a few exceptions, like /N/ in English), but only a
subset of these phonemes will surface word/syllable-finally.
What you have here is the inverse of that, almost -- save that
nasals and approximates, strangely, do not surface at all as
codas, precisely where you would expect them to do so.  My question
is:  what is motivating all this?

(Of course, you may want it that way.  Certainly, your proposal
for morphosyntax is almost certainly without precedent, also.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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