Re: Critique sought

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> But if you don't, it won't be very naturalistic.
But there are natural langs that are exceptions to those.  Some language
(Navajo?) I read about has /i e a u/, for example.  Russian, IIRC, has
/i -i u e o a/.  I've heard of /e a o/, but I wonder if /e/ and /o/ have
allophones [i] and [u] (in which case, you could arguably call them /i a
u/) or if it's an analysis that considers /i/ and /u/ to be allophones
of /j/ and /w/

> Practically speaking, that means it's weird to have vowels
> bunched up in the lower-fronter vowel space as you have (with an
> unusually high 14 vowels, no dialect of English even does that). You also
> have a distinction between lax vowels and tense vowels for the front
> high unrounded vowels ([i I]) but not for any of the others -- if the
> language were actually used in regular speech, that would almost certainly
> change quickly;  either the other vowels would acquire tense/lax variations
> of themselves, or (what's more likely) the one distinction made here would
> be dropped, most likely in favor of some vowel which approximates [i].
Or perhaps /I/ to /e/, /&/ merging with /a/ or /E/, /3/ to /O/ and /o/
to /u/, creating the not-too-odd

i      u
 e
  E @  O
   a   A

> If it has 1 nasal, it'll probably have [n] or [m];
Most likely /n/

> The latter is almost
> certainly not going to be the case -- language changes most easily
> by applying rules, and while allophones may be in freevariation,
> (a) they usually aren't, and (b) a full phoneme almost certainly wouldn't
> be (otherwise, why would people distinguish it in the first place?).
But consider the /r/ in many dialects, where both something like /kA/
and /kAr/ (I'm not sure of the vowel) are possible, and in free
variation (tho admittedly sociologically conditioned) variation.

--
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anonymous
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