Re: Futurese

>        I'll do you a favor: I'm going to ask you some questions that I
don't want
>you to answer, just think about. And when you get around to writing a more
>in-depth proposal, then you can answer them in the prologue.
>1. What significant advantages does an auxlang have over an international
>natlang (natural language) as an IAL?
First of all, it wouldn't grant its native speakers the
privilege of not having to spend their valuable time and
money in learning it in order to be able to communicate
internationally.


> You've already stated that you don't
>believe that an IAL will bring about world peace, happiness, etc. The
world,
>in the meantime, is happily communicating internationally in English.
English
>is not a perfect language by far, but it seems to be meeting the needs of a
>billion or so people. So what can top that?
I wouldn't say the world is that "happily" communicating
in English, or at least, those who have to waste a big
deal of their time and effort to "fight" with English
irregularities and idiosyncracies and have to do so
because if they can't speak English they simply won't
find a good job, while English native speakers can
simply forget anything about those hard pains and just
use their native tongue which they speak fluently without
the lesser effort; as I was saying, those people don't
seem to be that happy speaking English, or at least they
do their best and fully succeed to disguise their happiness
about English being the world's language.


>2. Are these advantages significant enough to overcome the major
difficulties
>inherent in an auxlang (no native speakers, microscopic amount of users, no
>literature, no prestige, no influence, etc.)
Those "difficulties" would easily and quickly be overcome
as soon as the auxlang received official recognition and
support.


>3. Are you being "patronizing" in deciding that because you don't want a
>natlang as an IAL, you should be the one to create an IAL for billions of
>people, when a vast majority of them show no indication in abandoning the
>current lingua franca of the world?
>4. Lastly, this is all academic unless you have a proposal for how this
could
>be implemented at an international level. Here on the CONLANG list, you
have
>fiat; you can wave your hand and say, "let it be so," and it is so. Before
>you continue spending euros at the internet cafe, consider whether you
have a
>plan to make sure those euros do more than just a.) provide hours of
amusing
>entertainment and b.) keep the internet cafe in business.
>
>> O.K. Everything agreed. But it seems you haven't noticed
>> that [a] and [?a] are going to be allophones of /a/. I
>> just placed the glottal stop in the phoneme chart to
>> round it up, because it is not completely ignored in
>> the phonology of the language: it will serve to distinguish
>> CVC VC from CV CVC.
>        That's not phonemic variation, though. Phonetic, yes, but your
chart did not
>seem to be a proposal of phonetic possibilities, but rather phonemes. Since
>it is possible to distinguish between CVC VC and CV CVC with other means
than
>a glottal stop, you don't need it on the chart.
Yes, it is possible, but they will be distinguished
precisely by means of the glottal stop.


>> The primary task of the preglottalized allophones is to
>> keep CVC-VC sequences that way, because if no glottal
>> stop is placed before the second vowel, the pronounciation
>> will tend to become CV-CVC, thus making the result
>> ambiguous, as it could be interpreted both as CVC VC and
>> CV CVC, which correspond to two totally different morpheme
>> sequences.
>        This occurs even with a glottal stop, especially in rapid speech.
Context
>disambiguates, assuming that your base vocabulary is not overcrowded within
>phonemic space.
If you pronounce CVC 'VC as a CV-CVC, the result is
CV-C'VC, i.e. with a glottalized consonant, and
then the difference between CVC VC and CV CVC would
be that of using normal vs. glottalized consonant.

Cheers,
Javier