Re: And who needs vowels?

On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 01:34:57PM -0600, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> On Dec 22, 2006, at 10:02 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> >Having recently learned a little Russian and stumbling across some Czech
> >in, of all places, a little puzzle game, and having heard of Georgian on
> >this list on a few occasions, I started to wonder where one may end up
> >should vowels remain in such poverty and consonants continue to
> >proliferate. And so, I dreamed of a conlang where all vowels have been
> >elided and substituted with sonorant consonants, and some words consist
> >of nothing but stops. For example:
>
> What a cool idea! I've toyed with making a conlang where all the
> underlying segments are consonants, but where some of them surface as
> vowels. The only problem (as I see it, anyway) is that I think having
> (underlying) vowels is a universal of some kind. I may be wrong,
> though (if so I'd love to hear about it).
Well, I'm not particularly worried about universals at this point,
since the point of this little exercise is to take consonant
proliferation to its logical conclusion. :-)


> I've also played a little bit with making a language which does have
> underlying vowels, but also has long initial clusters. This was
> influenced more by Old Tibetan than by Georgian, however.
Old Tibetan has long initial clusters? Heh, I'd never expect that from a
Sinitic language (or am I missing something here?). :-)


[...]
> Before I thought about/read about syllabic sibilants, I always
> considered e.g.  <street> to have one syllable; but since then it
> actually feels to me like it has two: [s=tr\i:t_}]. But then I'm odd
> :)
Well, I wouldn't consider the initial /s/ syllabic, unless you say it in
a really exaggerated way.


> >'b [?b=] (perhaps an implosive [b]? There is no audible release)
>
> Is there a reason you put [b=] but didn't put an = after the other
> stops?
Well, I was going to write [pg=] for /pg/ and [bg=] for /bg/, but for
whatever reason left it out. I'm using [=] only for segments that would
be considered as syllabic, and in the case of /'b/, the /b/ is syllabic.


> Also, is it possible for a stop to be "truly" syllabic? I seem to
> remember reading about a language where some stops *act* as if they're
> syllabic, but phonetically they have a schwa next to them.
Which is why I alluded to there being no audible release, or possibly
/b/ being implosive. /'b/ is a weird word where you don't part your lips
at all, and the sound consists only of the prevoicing of the /b/. The
initial glottal stop is merely to make this sound more forceful so that
it is audible. (The resulting sound is a bit like choking. :-P) So maybe
the /b/ here can't really be considered syllabic, only half-syllabic. It
would, of course, be impossible to do this for an unvoiced stop.


[...]
> >Of course, to make the prospective language more mellifluous
> >(*cough*), it seemed good to me that it should be tonal.
>
> I wonder if tone can really be distinguished on syllabic consonants.
Definitely. Pitch is controlled in the throat, it doesn't matter where
the tongue is. You can, for example, easily tell the difference between
"hmm?" (rising tone) and "hmm." (falling tone) in English.


> I am working on a conlang that uses some voiceless vowels and has two
> tones, and at first I was going to allow voiceless vowels to
> distinguish tone just like the voiced ones, but when I would try to
> pronounce them differently I found it very hard. Then I found out
> Japanese does not distinguish pitch in its voiceless vowels, so I
> decided I wouldn't either. Of course, I suppose it is possible to
> distinguish them, but Japanese speakers and I have trouble doing so;
> maybe some people don't have that problem.
[...]

I'm still unclear as to how exactly one goes about pronouncing a
voiceless vowel, so I can't help you there.

Anyway, it occurred to me just now that the native speakers of this
prospective conlang would be liable to consonantalize their vowels when
they speak a foreign language that actually has vowels. They would
probably substitute [l_j=] for high front vowels and [G=] for back
vowels, etc.. It would result in rather interesting mutilations of said
foreign language, to say the least. :-)

On that note, it seems inevitable that every human being would at some
point say [a], as a child or otherwise, although in the case of this
conlang it wouldn't be considered a lingual phoneme. In the perception
of said native speakers, vocalic languages would sound childish and
barbaric---how dare they pronounce a bare vowel in proper speech,
without any consonantal coloring!


T

--
Let's not fight disease by killing the patient. -- Sean 'Shaleh' Perry

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