Re: easy sounds

Quoting Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>:

> --- Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
> wrote:
>
> > On 6 Jan 2005, at 1.24 pm, Elliott Lash wrote:
> >
> > > --- Muke Tever <hotblack@...> wrote:
> > >
> > >> # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
>
> <big snip>
> > As for creating a language everyone can say---
>
> <snip>
>
> It seems to me the way to build a conlang that
> everyone can speak easily is to NOT specify exactly
> how each letter is to sound and let each speaker find
> their own comfortable way to pronounce it.  That way
> the conlang would have as many dialects and accents as
> any widespread natlang, and yet they would all be
> mutually intelligible.
I'm not in the habit of agreeing with Gary on matters of phonology, but he's
right here; an "easy for everyone" language should allow substantial variation
of exact realizations. As a corollary, it should have a smallish phonemic
inventory.

> If one person reads "Di kopu ele ablo dua trecho im di
> dentu, eh?" with an australian accent and another says
> it with an Italian  accent, and another with a German
> accent, it doesn't matter. They will all understand
> each other, and they will all find it easy to
> pronounce.
Not necessarily. It's amazing what an out-of-whack intonation can make to render
a statement incomprehensible even if the segmental sounds are right.

> (The example is from my language Mutande
> Palu which, when I speak it, sounds a bit like
> Swedish.)
I find that hard to imagine. The word-forms trike me as more Romance than
Swedish, and, IIRC, you're a native speaker of English, which means it's highly
unlikely you'll naturally read it with the tell-tale Swedish intonation.

> (This might be more an auxlang issue, but if a conlang
> has NO native speakers then the pronunciation should
> not be too closely specified anyway because people
> will pronounce it their own way depending on their own
> background anyway.)
I'd go as far as to say it's strictly an auxlang issue. Whether you can
pronounce my artlang correctly means a great deal less to me than whether I
like the exact sound I've given it. I'm sure I'm not alone in this attitude.

                                                  Andreas