Re: Futurese

At 7:16 pm -0400 29/4/02, Javier BF wrote:
[snip]
>> Several years ago, The University of California, Los Angeles Phono-
>> logical Segment Inventory Database, made a famous linguistical sur-
>> vey (known in short as the UPSID survey) in which they analyzed the
>> phoneme systems of 317 languages, chosen so as to include one
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.

[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.

[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/.

>>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.

[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.

>>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.

[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.

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.

Ray.



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