Re: Futurese

hi Javier! i was missing our discussion! :-)

Javier BF <uaxuctum@...> wrote:
>>>
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).
<<<
Tunu has no final ñ and no initial [N].
i think differently from you: i don't care about people who can pronounce a
phoneme ok. i care about a significant number of people not able to pronounce
it. and i don't care about the fact that a natlang doesn't feature a sound as
long as its speakers can pronounce such sound. no wonder we can't agree.

>>>
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.
<<<
never. long/short vowel are not a sound bet for french or spaniards and
regarding wu and ji, i've taught english to japanese so i 'm entitled to tell
you: "forget about it".

>>>
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/.
<<<
ditto. si and Si are not separate in lots of langs so i don't separate them.
other allophones of [h] are [P] in fornt [u] and [ç] in front of [i] which in
turn can be messed up for [f] or [p] and [s] or [ç] so i [h] has to be ruled out
in auxlangs---but not in your artlang Futurese.

>>>
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.

<<<
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. just
get rid of voiced/voiceleless and aspirated/nonaspirated distinction and you
make everybody happy. although i doubt you're into happiness.

>>>>
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.

>>>
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.

>>>
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.

>>>
Thank God!
<<<
i meant: you example is a misrepresentaion of japanese. japanese doesn't sound
like your "sample" sentence more than french sounds like "un chasseur sachant
chasser sans son chien faisait secher ses chaussettes sur une souche seche."
although i didn't feel your "kono ko to" example was a tongue twister--but i
will take it for a

>>>
It's not a matter of pronouncing each syllable separately,
but of pronouncing that sequence correctly in running speech.
<<<
i guess this running one was not an easy one for someone who can't understand a
word of japanese, but once you learn the lang and talk with millions who speak
it or learn it as a foreign language, you'll eventually find out that your
prevention is null and void.

>>>
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.

>>>
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.

>>>
[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.
<<<
not anymore. Christophe tried to explain in very clear terms, but you didn't
seem to understand so i won't waste my time here. ask a japanese.

>>>
I don't see any problem with the glottal stop.
<<<
you're a minority here. ask Christian wether an average German can pronounce an
initial vowel nonglottal. i can tell you a french cannot force himself to
glottalize a vowel except where he's learned to do so and i doubt your fellow
spanish-speaking fellows could. IAL-speaking, the glottal stop is irrelevant.
forget it as a consonant or phonemic "parser"--sorry to John Cowan, maybe he'll
hate me for writing so (if he ever reads and cares)--or certainly he won't. :-)

>>>
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. it is actually linked to the
Hertz-frequency of the language: when the range of phonemes of a language is
shorter, its frequency concentrates on a specific level. for instance, english
is 2000 Hz, french is 2700 Hz and Japanese is 4000 Hz.
fortunately for Tunu, you "tune on" very quickly as soon as you know enough
vocabulary.

>>>
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!
they thought it was only on saturday nights after 11 pm but now a mexican tells
them they're drunk 24h a day. :-)

>>>
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.
<<<
i don't have to coin lengthy Tunu words. once again, CC is just as long to
execute as CVC except for a few nanoseconds that will promote you the fastest
auxlang speaker of all times. confusion arises when two words have both a close
pronunciation and a close meaning--which is never the case in Tunu.

>>>
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.
<<<
Tunu words are not confusable. anyway, if you run for the easiest,
hard-confusable CVC lang, i challenge Futurese vs. Khmer and you're dead now.

>>>
>my guess is that you don't like a "poor" phonology--
And my guess is that you love them.
<<<
how perceptive! the only difference is that Tunu is an artlang, not an auxlang.
it's too cute and quaint a lang for you to ever get it.

>>>
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).
<<<
either your lang can be pronounciable and easy to learn for 100% of earthlings
or english rules. english rules so far.

>>>
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.

>>>
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. 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.

Mathias
http://takatunu.free.fr/tunugram.htm

Reply