Re: Futurese

>Yes, yes - but not all the 317 languages have the same importance, not all
>have roughly the same number of speakers.  To base arguments on raw
>statistics taken from the 317 languages is at best fairly meaningless, at
>worst misleading.  We must take the numbers of actual speakers into
>acoount.  To give, say, Chinese the same statistical value as !Xu is just
>barmy.
If you want a language to be "as neutral as possible", you
shouldn't consider that much that there are languages "more
important" than others.


>[snip]
>>> for the liquids (/l/ and /r/), 96% of the languages used at least
>>> one, 72% used more.
>
>Not helpful.  Somewhere about a quarter of the world's population speak a
>language with only one.
And about two thirds of the world's population speak
languages which do distinguish l/r. So why granting
that privilege to that quarter and not granting a
similar privilege to the rest?


>[snip]
>>>
>>> And as a final and very revealing result, they also found that
>>> NONE of the sounds was found in every language.
>
>{sigh} it is going to cause a lot less upset for, say, Hawaians learning to
>pronounce [x], than it is to get all the Chinese to pronounced a trilled
>/r/.
Haven't you notice Chinese DOES have a rhotic sound in their
inventory? It's the vowel sound spelled in Pinyin as "er".
Chinese may then try to pronounce "ra" by merging "er a".
And, as I said, the trill would just be the "ideal"
pronounciation; for /r/ any rhotic (including that Chinese
"er") will do as long as you make clear the difference with
/l/ and /d/.


>>>What this means is
>>> that ANY sound you choose to include in an IAL is likely to be
>>> found "difficult to pronounce" by the speakers of some or other
>>> language,
>
>See above - some languages are spoken by rather more people than others;
>therefore, rather more people share a certain set of speech habits than
>others.
Then, let's take the sound inventories of those most
spoken languages and see what they will find new in
the chart proposed:

Chinese: will have to learn consonant r and to extend
the voicing contrast from their sh/r pair to the six
pairs of the IAL. Also to use ng initially.

English: will have to learn all the vowels except the
schwa and to use ng and h in any position.

Spanish: will have to learn no vowel but the schwa and
some consonants: v, z, sh, zh, ng. Many Spanish speakers
do pronounce sh in borrowed English terms. In some
dialects sh appears (Andalusian) and in others zh
does (Argentinian).



>[snip]
>>>
>>> And the merging of L/R into one single phoneme (usually a middle-
>>> sound between the lateral L and the rolled R, called a flap), is
>>> not the rule but the exception, because, as you have just seen, L
>>> and R are distinguished in aprox. 72% of the languages at a global
>>> level.
>
>No - this is just plain bad statistics.  137 languages in *no way*
>represent all the myriad of languages throughout the world.  If you are
>talking about a _global_ level, your data needs to be global.
Yes, but those global data simply aren't available, because
there's little or no information about many of those 6,000
languages currently spoken.


>>>Where you're most likely to encounter languages that merge
>>> L/R is around the Time Date Line, that is, in parts of East Asia
>>> and Oceania, and the speakers of languages from other areas ins-
>>> tantly identify the merging of L/R as a local habit of that geo-
>>> graphical region.
>
>China is actually a not insignificant part of East Asia - and a reasonable
>distance from the Time Date Line.  But the same merging is, in fact, not by
>any means unknown among native African languages.
>
>[snip]
>>> So, as you can see, when designing the sound system of an IAL it
>>> is not possible that you take into account such local habits of
>>> pronounciation
>
>Sorry, writing off the speech habits of the Chinese who form not an
>inconsiderable part of the earth's population as "local habits of
>pronunciation" seems to me very patronizing.
That considerable part of today's Earth's population (those
figures may change in the future) lives in a very localized
part of the world.


>[snip]
>>>
>>> * JAPANESE (poor sound system = of course, VERY EASY to pronounce):
>>>
>>> -Anata ga kono otoko no ko to ikitakunakatta ne.
>>> (You didn't want to go with this child, right?)
>>>
>>> ...my tongue is starting to get dizzy!!
>
>What a strange tongue you have.  Mine hasn't turned a single circle yet, so
>it's nowhere near dizzy.  I don't see any problem.
Lucky you are. I frequently get lost when I reach
"nootokonokoto" and "toikitakunakatta".


>But in view of the many different ways /r/ is pronounced in western
>languages, it would be helpful to know how Futurese /r/ is to be
pronounced.

I've already explained that any rhotic would do for /r/,
though a trill would be preferrable and a tap preferrably
to be avoided.

Cheers,
Javier

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