Re: Marked and Unmarked

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001 11:33:44 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

< ... >
>Haha!  Funny.  Because I wanted a conlang with no lip movement , my
>conlang Tyl-Sjok has 7 (how did you now??) unrounded vowels.  This is
>not to be polite at court, but I found that a very funny thing to hear
>about Japanese.  It is because the people who speak it have the
>religion to be lazy.
>
>Actually, those are pretty much the ones of Romanian as I learned here
>last week (which made clear to me that my system wasn't too silly),
>but all unrounded and the mid vowels moved to mid-low to better
>distinguish them.  The system is (X-Sampa):
>
>   i   1   M
>   E   3   V
>       a
>
>Especially [1] and [M] are a bit hard to distinguish.  Roundedness
>would help, yes, but moving the mouth is out of question in my
>conlang. :-)
>
>To improve the differentiation, I just threw out all the diphthongs
>([EV], [Mi], [Ei] and [VM]), because it was very hard to pronounce
>them.
Who can prove such systems are common, may throw the first stone into me!

;)

>BTW: My first translation into Tyl-Sjok [t1l SVk] (formerly (un-)known
>as Tyl-Seok) is `The North Wind and The Sun'.  Should I post that?  Is
>anyone interested?  I have a very detailed translation (unfortunately,
>not on the Web yet).
If it's longish, it may be better to upload it somewhere. Takes about
the same time, but then is easier to refer to. But it's my opinion - I
mostly view the list through the listserve.brown.edu site, without using
the e-mail.

>
>**Henrik
Basilius