Re: Phonotactics of Velian I, or: Phonology of Velian II: The Wrath of John Vertical ;-)

(...)
>(That's my goal for this project...to make it sound like Finnish, but
>somehow...Not. I could do that vocabularily, but it would also be nice to be
>able to do it phon{etic,ologic,otactic}ally.)
>
>If I do so, is it credible to have a rule that excludes consonant clusters "in
>the Finnish places", except when they begin with a nasal
>(i.e. "tipit", "tipsit", "ntipit", "tipint" but not "titipt", "ptintit")?
Sure. A cluster analysis could fit better with initial preconsonantal nasals being
phonetically syllabic however. (But phone_m_ically, ie when it comes to stress
patterns etc, treating them as non-syllabic should be OK.)

BTW, on the subject of "sounding like Finnish but somehow not" one good
solution might be to only allow coronals or homorganic nasals as the initial
member of a cluster, EXCEPT for a few oddballs; Finnish has /ps ks/ here, but
you could have a different selection. Rechecking your phonology, /v\ L/ could
be used for Hungarian-ish flavor; or some subset of /c k q ?/ for appearing
more exotic...


>> 2) Completely lacking palatalized/labialized aspirates in a system this big
>> is odd.
>
>I think that's one I'll leave!
Well, that's a small pet peeve of mine. Aspiration is a *phonation*, not a POA
adjustment; it should come orthogonal to those, not perpendicular. That's not
really different from having a system of /p pj pw t tj tw k kj kw b d g/...

However, you also mentioned taking inspiration from Bantu - and I think Swahili
is an ANADEWism for exactly this, having aspiration only appearing as a marker
of one of the noun classes, so it's not unacceptable. :)


>I haven't yet worked out what happens with palatalised and labialised
>consonants, but I suspect that palatalised consonants are default before
>front, unrounded vowels, that labialised consonants are default before back
>unrounded vowels, and that both contrast with plain consonants before front
>rounded vowels. Or I could "go the Hungarian route" and have plain,
>palatalised, and labialised consonants regardless of position before vowels.
>
>Jeff
Here is another interesting choice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausa_language#Phonology
Cw Cj before front vowels, Cw C Cj before /a/, and Cw only before back
vowels... Front rounded might fit into this by having phonetically
labiopalatalized consonants as a neutralization of the labialized / palatalized
distinction.

BTW, you do realize you could only allow aspirates before a small subset of the
vowels, if you wanted to do something like this? Mwa ha ha haaa!*

John Vertical
*obligatory villain laughter

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