Re: A New Conlang For Your Consideration

Dirk Elzinga wrote:

>You give Nkrumah, mbwana, and Ndebele as examples of syllabic nasals.
>These are more likely to be prenasalized stops rather than syllabic
>nasals. Better examples might be the following words from Navajo, in
>which the initial nasals are genuinely syllabic:
>
>nda 'no'
>ndóstázii 'top (toy)'
>ndíghílii 'sunflower'
>
>You give an ejective verison as a freely varying alternant of the
>lateral affricate, and say that the non-ejective is more common
>word-initially. I would think that it should be the other way around,
>since acoustic cues for glottalization are more obvious in the release;
>i.e., on a following vowel.
>
>Finally, how are mid-low and falling tones distinguished in the
>romanization?
Dirk:  thanks for the Navajo examples.  I will incorporate them into the
next update of the site, as well as the switch in the word-initial ejective
pronunciation for the lateral affricate, which I have no problem with.

As for indicating tone, grammatically meaningful tones only occur on the
stressed syllable (plus all subsequent syllables) of Ithkuil words, and can
never be mid-low tone.  Mid-low tone is used solely for all word syllables
prior to the stressed syllable as a way of indicating a new word has
started.  No stressed syllable (or subsequent syllable) can have mid-low
tone, therefore it operates in mutual exclusivity with the other four
tones.  Since an UNMARKED STRESSED syllable can't have mid-low tone, its
unmarked status is used to show falling tone.  (As for monosyllabic words,
they cannot take mid-low tone, again allowing their "default" (unmarked)
tone to be falling.)

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