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

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Friday, July 6, 2007, 7:32
(...)
>(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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Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...>
Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...>