Re: trQal

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Edward Heil wrote:

> (To Patrick Dunn)
>
> Pat, I have some suggestions for Trollish that are radical enough that they'd
> probably be too much of a pain in the ass to implement -- it's a matter of
> reworking the phonological system from the ground up.  But I present them for
> your amusement.
Actually, I don't mind overhauling the whole darned thing.  I get a kick
out of working with it, so much so that I feel like _qleg_ing my way home
afterwards (that's walking on one's knuckles, incidently).

> You had a post-velar point of articulation that you got into trouble by
> calling "glottal" and putting voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives there.
>  You ended up changing that to "eructative," which works OK, but I suggest
> just making them "uvular" or "pharyngeal" or some combination thereof and
> saving the "eructatives" for something else...
> Make "eructative/pulmonic" a vowel distinction.  Give every vowel (or some of
> them) and eructative counterpart.  This could be simulated by humans by using
> creaky voice (sounds vaguely like a burp!), and you could use the creaky voice
> symbol as a diacritic (a tilde underneath the vowel -- in the various
> IPA/ASCII representations this shows up as ~  ;~ or _k).  Or you could make up
> your own diacritic that works for you, since TrQal doesn't quite use standard
> IPA/ASCII representations anyway.
I'm liking that.  Part of my present problem with trQal is the lack of
phenomes.  Makes word construction boring.

> Oh, and maybe you could throw in a little-used phoneme, the "gnash," which is
> produced by striking or grinding the fangs together?  Perhaps it shows up in
> certain threatening interjections....
I like this, too.  I was also thinking of a dental fricative -- you know,
gritted teeth and hissing air?

--Patrick