>And on what basis do you claim your Tunu to beat Futurese?
>Can your Tunu afford having monosyllabic roots?
><<<
>never! bisyllabic roots rule! :-) i speak OK a CV(CV)-rooted lang
(japanese) and
>a CV(V)C-rooted lang (khmer) and i can tell you that this doesn't make ny
>difference in speech relevance. your concern with "monosyllabic roots" is a
>useless mania.
It won't be considered a mania for that billion of Chinese
speakers used to "one syllable = one morpheme".
>Chinese would be much pleased if instead of merging voiced
>with voiceless, you turned their opposition into one of
>aspirated vs. unaspirated.
>>>>
>never. that would really make the lang impossible for half of humankind.
You use the word "impossible" too easily. I'm a native
speaker of Spanish, so I wasn't used at all to pronouncing
aspirated consonants. But now that I've learned English
I can pronounce them without difficulty, just as I've
learned to switch from Spanish syllable-timed prosody to
English stress-timed prosody. It wasn't easy at first, but
certainly it was far from being impossible; it was just a
matter of getting used to it thorugh practice.
>That way, instead of a vocabulary
>composed of lengthy polysyllabic words, the language would
>afford to be monosyllabic, a feature that will please
>Chinese much more than having so little sounds, which will
>then have to be pronounced very frequently thus increasing
>the risk of sentences turning up as tongue-twisters.
><<<
>CVCV is not "longer" than CVC because the CC part in a CVCCVC thread takes
as
>much "time" to pronounce as CVCCVC for all people not used to CC. that's
how it
>goes.
Yes, but in CVCV you have only one morpheme, while in CVCCVC
there are two. Two morphemes in Tunu would be CVCVCVCV which
is by all accounts longer than CVCCVC.
>And about 4 billions don't have any problem with them.
>I think 4 billions clearly "beat" that billion.
><<<
>again: we have a different viewpoints and logics about this all. i say
that (i)
>all earthlings can pronounce either [r] or [l] (even rotokas! :-) and (ii)
1.5
>billion can't so (iii) let's have all earthlings pronounce either [r] or
[l] as
>they wish---while you say that (iii) let the 1.5 billion die for the sake
of
>your CVC system that needs a neat number of consonants.
And why helping those 1.5 billion with the l/r "problem"
but not helping those at least 0.5 billion with their own
b/v "problem" or those hudreds of millions of Arabic
speakers with their i/e, u/o and e/a/o "problems"? Or is
it that a "problem" must be shared by at least one billion
speakers to be taken into account while counts for nothing
if the figure doesn't reach that limit?
>No, Japanese people will tend to pronounce si, ti and tu
>as shi, chi and tsu.
><<<
>they won't. they can pronounce [si], [ti] and [tu] as [si], [ti] and [tu].
i'm
>positive about this. the fact that their language says [Si], [tSi] and
[tsu]
>doesn't alter their ability to pronounce [si], [ti] and [tu]---exactly like
>french people have NO problem to pronounce [tS] wherever is needed or
feels more
>english-like---for instance a tennis "smash" is pronounced "smatch"
because it
>sounds more cool.
Of course, and the Chinese have nothing in their mouths
that makes impossible for them to pronounce an "r". I've
heard many Chinese people here in Spain that pronounce
our r's very well. It's just a matter of imitating
what they hear.
>O.K. but people would prefer a language they can easily
>pronounce at the speech speed they need, not one that
>forces them to make frequent pauses to keep their
>tongue from getting twisted.
><<<
>i enjoy japanese a lot precisely because i can pronounce many more
syllables
>within a shorter time than in any other languages i know. it feels like
surfing.
>ask Kou and other japanophones about this fun part of japanese.
What I find most difficult in understanding spoken
Japanese is precisely that they talk too quickly.
>May I know then why your Tunu, supposedly easy to pronounce
>for millions and billions, features /tS/, which is not used
>by e.g. those millions of speakers of Arabic and French, or
>/N/, which is hard to tell apart from /n/ for those hundreds
>of millions of Spanish speakers?
><<<
>arabs have [dZ], which is Tunu's /ch/'s allophone---remember: Tunu doesn't
make
>any difference between voiced/unvoiced consonants.
>french have absolutely no problem to pronounce "Chernobyl", "game, set and
>match", "dansons le cha-cha", "Tchad", "tchou-tchou", "Ô Catarinetta
>bella--tchi-tchi", "Aldo Maccione, la classe!", "Machu-Picchu", etc. As
for [N]
>i can hear my g/f pronounce "tengo" OK. of course [N] is not going to
appear as
>an initial.
What's the problem with initial [N]? It is present
in languages like Indonesian, that is usually regarded
as a quite easy language to pronounce.
>What I find difficult is that the same sounds repeat
>constantly, and that's so because the sound inventory
>is very limited and thus each segment must necessarily
>appear very frequently.
><<<
>that's your only valid critic. i can tell from my own experience when i
learned
>japanese. i felt like "all the words sound the same" for a few weeks (now
i know
>that hebrew is so worse that i wouldn't complain with japanese anymore :-).
>you're right as long as you don't "internalize" the words. but once a word
>"means" something to you, then you don't care whether it sounds like
another
>word. i agree that it takes a few weeks to adapt.
The same is applicable to Futurese (and to any language).
As soon as you learn to associate a CVC word to a meaning,
it will come out to you "instinctively" when you think of
that concept, and even more if the CVC word has some kind
of onomatopoeic or expressive connotation.
>Even if you allow for a CVC syllable structure but still
>keep a very reduced number of phonemes, the resulting
>sentences will tend to be found tongue-twisting by many
>non-native speakers. Take for example Finnish.
><<<
>great news to the finnish list-members: your lang is difficult to
pronounce!
What do you mean? Futurese sound system is quite similar
to that of Indonesian, and Indonesian is not generally
considered a difficult language to pronounce.
>they thought it was only on saturday nights after 11 pm but now a mexican
tells
>them they're drunk 24h a day. :-)
I have no idea what you mean here. What does a Mexican,
Saturday nights and being drunk all day have to do with
anything we've been talking about here?
>either your lang can be pronounciable and easy to learn for 100% of
earthlings
>or english rules. english rules so far.
For a language to be "pronounceable and easy to learn"
for 100% earthlings, its phoneme chart must be reduced
to just /p/, /t/, /a/ and its grammar to Tarzan-speech.
And, even with all that, you'll always have the
problem of having to learn a vocabulary, so what you're
asking for is simply IMPOSSIBLE. I'm not looking for
a "perfect" IAL, I think the very idea of it is silly;
what I'm looking for is a language that makes a suitable
compromise between the various requirements for a
language to fit as an IAL.
>How many languages in the world display such small-sized
>phoneme charts as those of Japanese or Samoan? How many
>speakers do those languages have? Of all the major languages
>of the world (English, Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic,
>Russian....), those spoken by billions and billions, none
>uses such a reduced set of sounds.
><<<
>the thing is, the billions and billions don't use a common set of sounds
but can
>use a common set of sounds. it's called the lowest common denominator. you
take
>it or speak english.
May I know why you reduce the problem to just "take it or
speak English"? Do you fear that there may be other
possible solutions?
>You can make as many false claims upon me as you want.
>It will only show that your lack of better arguments to
>offer.
><<<
>i don't offer anything here. my conlang is not to learn for anyone except
for
>half of myself when i'm retired in 2032. but your Futurese is going to
make you
>insane.
May I know why? I consider myself a quite balanced
person.
> so my better argument is the following: realize no one in the world
>except yourself doesn't need your lang and grow it a respected conlang so
that
>our community makes you an eternal name among us.
I care absolutely nothing about fame.
Cheers,
Javier