Re: Wofir aka The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis

On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 09:04:57AM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 06:57:23AM +0100, Raymond Brown wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > e.g. drop the {h} in spelling?  Wouldn't a portmanteauization
> > [snip]                                               ^^^^
> >
> > Hey!! a tetraphthong! :-P
>
> Don't we wish.  French seems to be chock full of multiple vowels that
> sound, to my ear, like single-thongs or diphthongs at best, like l'eau.
> <rueful look>
[snip]

Hehe, I know it can't be a tetraphthong... at most it'd be a triphthong
eau + a monosyllable i (since the i is part of the -ization suffix). But
even "eau" itself may not be a proper triphthong...

On a related note, I've decided that my current conlang will have NO
diphthongs. There is a (somewhat contrived?) mechanism of splitting a long
vowel into two short vowels during inflection, and if the inflection rules
happen to make both short vowels identical, they are "merged" back into a
long vowel. But if the vowels are different, they are pronounced with a
distinct glottal stop between them. Not sure how realistic this is,
though... these odd rules came about mostly due to aesthetic
considerations.

Some of the descendant langs will, of course, lose the glottal stop and
start acquiring diphthongs and the like. (In fact, the "merging back"
phenomenon above could be a start of this process of dropping the glottal
stop between vowels...)


T