Yivríndil Phonology (the last one)

>> /E/ --> [e] before y, yy, and perhaps h, and before all vowels
>> /I/ --> [i] in the same cases, and finally
>> /e/ and /i/ are [e i] in all positions.
>>
>> Therein lies the ambiguity, since given final or prevocalic [e], it's
>> uncertain whether the phoneme is really /E/ or /e/.
>
>From the above, final /E/ and /e/ contrast.
Aargh!  Once again I have omitted or mistyped something!  What I *meant*
is that both /E/ and /I/ are [e] and [i] respectively before y, yy, other
vowels, and finally.  So final /e/ and /E/ do *not* contrast.

>> Yivríndil orthography indicates a syllable break between two vowels).
I
>> need to explain why sometimes o+i becomes a diphthong and sometimes it
>> doesn't, either by saying that the diphthongs contain a different
phoneme
>> that *always* forms a diphthong, or by supposing the existence of a
>> "diaresis phoneme" which prevents diphthongization.  (For various
>> reasons, this problems doesn't exist with a+i, but it does exist for
>> every other vowel.)  I actually might do the latter, but in all
honestly,
>> neither solution is all that elegant, since they both require some ad
hoc
>> creation of phonemes.  Hence my continuing muddle.
>
>I may be misunderstanding you somewhere, but it seems that introducing
>an obligatorily diphthonging phoneme or an antidiphthonging diaretic
>phoneme is not at all appropriate, at least from a mainstream
phonological
>perspective. Surely what you need is to accept that syllabification is
not
>fully predictable from phonemic structure, and in some cases, namely for
>vowel + I, the syllabification of the sequence must be stipulated on a
>word-by-word basis.
But do I haaave to? /<whiny little kid's voice>  I don't like accepting
non-uniform and non-predictable formulations, but I might have no choice
here--so syllable structure might be defined on a word-by-word or
morpheme-by-morpheme basis.  There is one other possibility, which arises
from the fact that the processes which result in diphthongs are usually
processes that work on the same part of speech, like noun cases or
possession.  However, the processes that create the monophthongs tend to
be in derivatives of different parts of speech, so I could formulate a
rule that prevents monophthongization across segment boundaries or
something like that.  To do this, however, I also have to bring in a lot
of consonantal processes and it gets much more complicated.

The problem is that I design these things for phonological and
morphological aesthetics, and don't actually try to describe them
formally until afterwards.  It's less consistent and a lot harder that
way, but much more fun.  When I actually figure this one out, I'll post
it on the list.

Jesse S. Bangs   Pelíran
jaspax@juno.com  jaspax@yahoo.com
"I wish that I could stop playing Superman
I have decided to let the case drop
I'm no Superman" --Blindside