Re: Futurese

>Javier BF <uaxuctum@...> wrote:
>
> > > c) PHONOLOGY
> > > Lab. Dent./Alv. Pal. Vel. Glot.
> > > Ocl. p / b t / d k / g '
> > > Affr. ch
> > > Fric. f s sh h
> > > Nas. m n ñ ng
> > > Liq. l / r
> > > Aprox. j w
>
>plenty of people cannot articulate ñ and ng as initials, like many
americans
>pronounce New York as Noo York.
Certainly, any of those hundreds of millions of Spanish
speakers don't have any problem pronouncing ñ as initial
(they, on the contrary, will have problem with it as
final). And initial ng will cause no problem to those
many Asian whose native language uses it that way (e.g.
those tens of millions of native speakers of Vietnamese).


> other difficult stuff: [ji], [wu], telling
>[s] from [S], pronouncing [h] for spaniards, french, italians, slavs, etc.
>anyway, with a CVCV pattern and {p, t, tS, k, l, m, n, N, j, w} my Tunu
>artlang beats your Futurese auxlang.
You can substitute [ji] and [wu] with long i and long u.
Besides, its easy to get them right if you learn to
pronounce them by repeating the rows "ja, je, ji, jo, ju,
jy" and "wa, we, wi, wo, wu, wy"; that way the pronounciation
of ji and wu comes out instinctively.

Regarding s/S, those sounds are separate in lots of languages.
And if you can't pronounce [h], you may just pronounce [x] or
[X], since these are all going to be allophones of /h/.

And on what basis do you claim your Tunu to beat Futurese?
Can your Tunu afford having monosyllabic roots?


>i tend to care more about the number of people who can or can't pronounce a
>phoneme than the number of languages featuring or lacking it. in other
>words, i'd rather merge b and p, d and t, g and k, r and l into one phoneme
>to make a lang easy for chinese to pronounce and understand it while i
don't
>plan merging m and n to please rotokas.
Chinese would be much pleased if instead of merging voiced
with voiceless, you turned their opposition into one of
aspirated vs. unaspirated. 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.


>72% of languages distinguish r vs. l, but a billion people don't,
And about 4 billions don't have any problem with them.
I think 4 billions clearly "beat" that billion.


> so i
>wouldn't either. on the other hand, original japanese had no [si], [ti] or
>[tu] but japanese people can pronounce them without any problem so i would
>keep them even if i was designing a lang for asians.
No, Japanese people will tend to pronounce si, ti and tu
as shi, chi and tsu.


> > > * 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!!
><<<
>(i) not all sentences are such in japanese.
Thank God!


>(ii) each syllable of this sentence is easy to pronounce for a majority of
>people.
>(iii) if yourself cannot pronounce a, na, ta, ga, ko, no, o, to, ko, i, ki,
>ta, ku, ka, ta, ne, then maybe your orthophonist could help
It's not a matter of pronouncing each syllable separately,
but of pronouncing that sequence correctly in running speech.


>(iv) you're not forced to say them all at once 100 m/ph
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.

>(v) i don't quite follow your argument that an IAL should feature phonemes
>that billions can't pronounce or tell from each others just because this
>makes the IAL easier.
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?


>i work in japanese very often and my tongue has never suffered from it.
>japanese consonants: h, P, b, s, z, S, dZ, tS, m, n, t, ts, k, g, 4, j, w,
>and i must forget some other ones (dunno whether bj, pj, kj and rj should
be
>in).
[P] is an allophone of /h/, [S] of /s/, [dZ] of /d/,
[ts] of /t/. bj, pj, kj and rj are just the result of
combining b, p, k, r with the diphthongs ja, jo, ju.


> > > * SAMOAN (perfect example of extremely poor sound system = of course,
> > > this one must certainly be DEAD EASY to pronounce):
> > >
> > > -O fea e fa'atau ai se fuâlâ'au? (Where can I buy a fruit?)
> > > -'Ou te lê mana'o 'i le mea lena. (I don't want that)
> > > -E fia le tau aofa'i? (How much is all of this?)
> > > -E mafai ona 'e fa'epa'û la'itiiti i lalo?
> > > (Can I have it at a cheaper price?)
> > >
> > > ...MY OUTRAGED ACHING TONGUE IS CLAIMING FOR REVENGE!!!
><<<
>the problem here is the glottal stop and the clusters of vowels. if you
drop
>the glottal stop and the long clusters of vowels, the phonology is easy.
but
>i can see that Futurese keeps the glottal stop.
I don't see any problem with the glottal stop. 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.

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.


> > > As you see, having a poor sound system doesn't turn a language into
> > > an easy one to pronounce, but quite on the contrary, because having
> > > so little to choose from, the same sounds and syllable structures
> > > have to be used really frequently thus turning simple sentences into
> > > annoying nearly-unpronounceable tongue-twisters.
><<<
>people learning japanese will all tell you that the phonology is easy. the
>problem is to make word patterns that make words sound different enough
from
>one another. if "toro" means "arm" and "tori" means "finger", then you're
in
>trouble.
That's what you get for having so little phonemes to
choose from. The ease in pronounciation you may get
is achieved at high the cost of making words lengthy
and easily confusable. That's why most languages
choose not to use so reduced phoneme sets, but prefer
medium-sized ones, such as the one of Futurese, which
enables them to use shorter and less easily-confusable
words.


>my guess is that you don't like a "poor" phonology--
And my guess is that you love them.


>i'd rather you to say a
>limited one compared to european languages--because you irrationally
dislike
>it. you don't want an IAL to sound "childish" like japanese or samoan do.
No, I've already offered objective arguments to support
the use of a medium-sized phoneme chart is preferrable
to a small-sized (it prevents simple sentences from
becoming tongue-twisters, it allows for monosyllabicity,
i.e. it allows shortness of expression, and it makes
words less easily confusable).

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.


>you are a typical auxlanger in that regard: you set tenets first based on
>your personal subjective likings, then you make up arguments to discard
>other systems and justify yours.
You can make as many false claims upon me as you want.
It will only show that your lack of better arguments to
offer.