Re: WC8 (was Re: TECH: Testing again etc.)

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 17:14:29 -0500, JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
wrote:

> Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:
>
>> On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 15:59:22 -0500, Paul Bennett <paul-
>> bennett@nc.rr.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I forgot to include that the "regular" consonants (the ones above), may
>> combine syllable-initially in a number of ways, e.g. ...
>>
>> st zd ts dz nd nz zn ndz
>>
>> The sequences CN are illegal sequences, but that's about the only
>> limitation.
>
> So any homorganic sequence is okay? What about /kg/? Or /Tdn/? Or /pmfb/?
> Surely there's *some* limit, unless you're meaning to have Georgian-style
> syllable structure.
Argh! No! My language! Look what he's doing to my language!

I misspoke. I meant to rule out CN sequences from the set of clusters
vaguely implied by the list I gave. Actually, for whatever it's worth, for
now, imagine that the list of onset clusters is limited to that list, for
each place of articulation.

> It's rather curious that CN is disallowed, since CN is commoner cross-
> linguistically than NC, which you show above. In the languages that I
> know of
> with initial NC sequences they are treated as monophonemic prenasalized
> stops.
CN is disallowed simply because I personally have a difficult time
pronouncing homorganic CN without some kind of "helper" sounds going on,
either a short schwa, or some kind of glottalic constriction, or something
else equally off-putting and ill-fitting.

In the native description, compounds are single phonemes. I choose to write
them as character sequences of the same letters that make up "simple"
consonants because otherwise I'd run out of characters, or at least
sensible character+diacritic combinations that remain in the Latin arena.

Likewise for the native syllabary, which already has somewhere over 600
glyphs, and would become very much larger if they had a glyph for every
single possible phoneme. Some clever scribe at some point in their history
noticed the fact that compounds were exactly that -- compounds of
homorganic sounds. Around the time the script moved from logography to
syllabary, this same clever scribe decided to make his own job that much
easier.

Hmm. Maybe a semi-mythical script-creation story is required. If so,
probably a king gets a visitor in a dream that tells him to make a new
script, and lays down guidelines for doing so. *That*'s never been done
before, surely? ;-)




Paul