Re: Futurese

>>3) Phoneme chart:
>>--------------------------------------------------------
>>.............|. labial .| dent-alve | palat-velar | gl |
>>-------------------------------------------------------|
>>plosives: ...| p .......|. t .......|......... k .|. ' |
>>.............| b .......|. d .......|......... g .|....|
>>fricatives: .|...... f .|....... s .|. c .........|. h |
>>.............|...... v .|....... z .|. x .........|....|
>>nasals: .....| m .......|. n .......|......... q .|....|
>>liquids: ....|..........|. l .......|.............|....|
>>.............|..........|. r .......|.............|....|
>>semivowels: .|..........|...........|. j ..... w .|....|
>>-------------|-----------------------------------------|
>>vowels: .....|........................ i . y . u ..... |
>>.............|.......................... e . o ....... |
>>.............|............................ a ......... |
>>--------------------------------------------------------
>>(p, t and k, aspirated; y, schwa)
>
>If I'm reading this correctly, |x| is a voiced palatal fricative! I'd find
>that mightily difficult to distinguish from [j], and I bet I'm not alone. I
Well, sorry, I guess I should have offered an ASCII-IPA
equivalent for each phoneme, so as to avoid misunderstandings
such as this. The chart I offered was meant just as a quick
summary.

Letter <x> would represent not a palatal fricative but a
postalveolar one, that is /Z/, as in English "meaSure",
"aZure" or French "j".


>In
>addition, any language that uses |x| for anything voiced ought to be shot,
>IMHO.
May I know why on Earth?!
According to that, English ought to be "shot", because it uses
<x> for something voiced in some cases (think of "example" and
"xylophone"), not to mention Albanian, which uses <x> for
/dz/ and "xh" for /dZ/.


> Unvoiced palatal fricative would be less of problem, but it's not
>exactly the commonest phone on the planet either. If nothing else, make [S]
>and [Z] legitimate variants.
>Of course, if you don't intend |c x| to indicate palatal fricatives this
>criticism falls,
You said it.

> except I'd still hate |x| to indicate anything voiced.
I'm waiting for undefeatable arguments against the use
of letter x for something voiced; I mean, other than your
personal taste which is of course totally irrelevant.


>It's quite obvious you'ven't tried to achieve a maximally universal set of
>contrastive sounds, but are real sure your IAL ought to distinguish 'tween
>/l/ and /r/? And exactly what kind of "r" are we speaking about? From your
>chart above I'd have to guess it's a dental trill.
Well, I've already posted in several other places very
extensive and detailed arguments to support the choice of
phonemes, which by no means is arbitrary. If you want I'll
paste those explanations here.


>>4) Syllable structure: (C)V(C)
>>(glottal stop inherent in syllable-initial vowels)
>>
>Does this mean that the glottal stop, in fact, isn't a phonemic consonant?
Yes, the glottal stop in fact isn't a phonemic consonant;
what you have instead is pre-glottalized syllable-initial
allophones for the vowels.


>Otherwise it'd seem you couldn't distinguish, in spoken language, between
>f'rinstance /'a/ and /a/.
Well, certainly that must be a difficult difference to
distinguish, since it's very rarely encountered: of all the
sound systems I'm familiar with--and you can bet they're not
just two or three--, only in some Polynesian languages do
they distinguish between /?a/ and /a/. Anywhere else, either
vowels are forbidden in initial position (think of Arabic)
or the glottal stop is not considered a phoneme (think of
German, which automatically places a glottal stop before
every syllable-initial vowel).


>>5) Basic vocabulary: MONOSYLLABIC
>
>Assuming the glottal stop not to be phonetic, that give you 2646
>monosyllables. Should easily suffice for the basic vocabulary I guess.
I think so too.


>>6) Vocabulary sources:
>>(a) onomatopoeic / expressive
>>(b) "inspired" by existing languages (Lojban's method)
>
>You're not going to borrow "international" technical vocabulary?
In a previous reply I've already mentioned that polysyllabic
words would be accepted for very specific needs, such as that
of technical language.


>>7) Right-branching
>>
>>8) Basic sentence structure: theme - predicator - rheme
>>
>>Any comment? :-)
>
>My initial impression is that this's gonna look like the result of a
>run-of-the-mill euroclone IAL secretly dating Chinese. :-)
Have you had a look at the sample sentences yet?
If those sentences look to you like a euroclone IAL, then
anything will.

Cheers,
Javier

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