Re: another silly phonology question

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >
> > > Interesting, so you intuitively ended up dropping just those sounds that
> > > are most likely to be dropped if any stops are dropped?
> >
> > <rueful g>  I don't know if it was even intuitive.  I just didn't like
> > the way [p] and [g] sounded!  Aesthetic intuition?  Beats me.  :-p
>
> This is as good an argument for universals as any which have been
> made. I suspect that many conlangs being developed by people who are
> otherwise linguistically naive will show effects of purported
> universals (as well as L1 interference--the "relex" problem).
<wry g>  If I need a concept-base, fast, I tend to work off Korean rather
than English.  Considering that the status of Korean in any language
family still seems confused, I figure it's going to end up a lot more
interesting than a relex of English.  My earliest quasi-conlang was
actually more like a relex of French, because having been taught grammar,
I could sort of see what was going on grammatically, whereas my schooling
in English grammar is pretty lousy.

This isn't to say English or Korean is more interesting inherently, just
that there are more English-speakers than Korean-speakers, and almost
certainly more English-speaking conlangers than Korean-speaking
conlangers (even if you count lousy Korean-Americans like me).

YHL