Re: Too bizarre?

Hi Ray,
comments in line.

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003 16:44:21 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

>I've recently been having one or two thoughts about the BrScB syllabary.
>You may recall that it was developed from an idea Dirk suggested in 1999.
>At the time he said it was "probably a little too baroque for practical
>use".   But as a lover of baroque I found it attractive :-)
>
>One of the problems, however, with the BrScB scheme is that we need an
>extra character, a bit like Lin's "cements", to make the vocalization
>clear. So a two consonant written word does, in fact, need a _third_
>symbol both to make the vocalization and the meaning clear.  This seems a
>weakness.
>
>I recall that at about the same time that Dirk was suggesting his
>'syllabary', Srikanth, the inventor of Lin, suggested a scheme whereby two
>consonants actually determined between themselves what their own
>vocalization was.  Unfortunately I did not keep the mail where he outlined
>his scheme; all I have is this tantalizing fragment:
>"it struck me that there is equally simple system to exhaust all
>phonotactically allowed open syllables by requiring pairs of letters to
>jointly determine the two syllables they will represent (for example):
>sk /suki/
>sg /segi/
>tk /tuka/
>tg /tega/"
>
>(I don't suppose Dirk, or BP - or any one else - has kept any fuller info.
>  about Srikanth's scheme)
If this was in 1999, it should be in the Conlang list archives, unless it
was sent privately. I haven't tried searching yet.

>I guess I thought that was approaching the rococo :)
>But I have been re-thinking this again. I don't know how Srikanth was
>imagining it. But at present BrScB has four vowels:
>                FRONT    BACK
>High     i        u
>Low      E        O
>
>As I was going through truth tables with my students the other day, it
>suddenly struck me that the two input columns for AND, OR and XOR had four
>arrangements and if, instead of putting A and B at the top of each column
>we could have:
>         Lo/Hi  Back/Front
>           0        0       = /O/
>           1        0       = /u/
>           0        1       = /E/
>           1        1       = /i/
>
>Where Lo=0, Hi=1; and 0 = Back (and rounded) and 1 = Front (and unrounded)
>.
So far, this is what I did for Pre{'Yemls}, so it doesn't look bizarre to
me!

>Thus if we reassign the BrScB plosives, fricatives and alveolar
>approximant thus:
>
>                      Binary values
>                       0       1
>bilabial plosive  /p/  b       p
>alveolar plosive  /t/  d       t
>velar plosive     /k/  g       k
>labiodental fric. /f/  v       f
>alveolar fric.    /s/  z       s
>alveolar appr.    /l/  r       l
>
>The first consonant, as in the binary table above, determines the height
>and the second whether it is back or front, e.g.
>bz (00) = /pOsO/
>pz (10) = /pusu/
>bs (01) = /pEsE/
>ps (11) = /pisi/
With {'Yemls} I used the corresponding upper case letters to indicate the
Lo vowels, so that I only needed to handle front/back. Also, I only needed
to deal with one syllable at a time.

     Back Front
//   o    e
/b/  b    p
/f/  f    v
/m/  m    w
/l/  r    l
/t/  t    c
/d/  d    j
/s/  s    x
/z/  z    i
/n/  n    y
/k/  q    k
/g/  g    a
/x/  u    h

This part is of course different from your scheme here. On the other hand,
later phonetic processes caused an interaction between vowels of adjacent
syllables. E.g. the consonant of {x} becomes [S], distinct from the [s] of
{S}, so that the vowel can switch between front and back according to the
next syllable.

Anyways I know
a) you want to avoid upper case for BrSc (ease of typing),
b) you probably want to avoid unusual letter assignments, such as a, i,
   or u for consonants (ease of learning),
c) (I forgot what else),
so I know this isn't directly helpful but maybe it will trigger something?

>The advantages of this over the present BrScB scheme is that:
>- we do not need any extra symbol to make the vocalization clear;
>- bz, pz etc have only _one_ meaning each instead of two possible meanings
>which IMO is better.
I don't remember the current scheme. Do you also have 1 or 3 consonant
words? If so, how would you handle them here?

>But is it too bizarre??
Not too bizarre, but does it meet you requirements for BrSc?

Jeff

>Ray
>===============================================
>http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
>ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
>raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
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