Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
>It was the same idea I had for Reman (and I think I managed :) ). You can
>see
>the result at http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr/ if you can handle French.
Very nice, Christophe. Surprisingly babelfish didnt do too badly when I
sent your page through it. You must not be using idioms or anything that
can throw the translator off.
>
>
>Isn't that the common pronunciation in Spanish? :)
Not quite. The d sound intervocalically and finally in the Spanish I hear
a lot, seems to still be holding on (even though it's fairly faint, and
even when I pronounce it, it's faint as well). I do a complete drop.
Perhaps peninsular Spanish it's dropped, but for Latin American Spanish
(Mexican at least) it seems to still be there.
>
>
>Modern English doesn't really have an opposition between short and long
>vowels,
>but between lax vowels, tense vowels and diphtongs. But it's called short
>and
>long vowels for historical reasons. In Latin, long vowels were simply
>like the
>short vowels, pronounced for a longer time. There was also a small
>difference of
>height in some cases (like long e which could be considered mid-high:
>/e:/,
>while short e was lower: /E/. As short i was also lower than long i, with
>time
>/i/ and /e:/ got mixed up -there's some proofs in people's orthographic
>mistakes, like writing sine: without "sene"-), but the main difference
>(until it
>disappeared) was one of time. In a language like Japanese, the difference
>of
>time between short vowels and long vowels is obvious. They are pronounced
>the
>same way, but long ones are twice as long as short ones.
Since my mom works at a school, she says when they teach the kids how to
read, they call the vowels hard or soft.

 Anyway,  I like this distinction, and I think since it's different from
what existing Romance langs do, I will incorporate it into my lang. So,
where Spanish would diphthongize, this one lengthens the vowels. I'll need
to think of a way to represent this orthographically. I dont want to
double the vowels (because i dont even like that in Latinized written
Japanese). I'm thinking I could use the breve accent for denoting length
and the acute for stress (but, i am open to any suggestions, since i dont
know if there's a way to do macrons).

- NOVE > nòve
- OSSU > òso
- BONU > bòno
>
>
>
>I think you'll manage :) and this idea of final /N/ is nice, quite rare in
>Romance langs.
I think it's a rather pleasant sound. I notice one of my Professors (who
is a Cubana, but speaks English and Polish). She often pronounces words
like "sometime" as:

- sometime > /sontajN/

So, her word final m's seem to change to n or usually /N/
>