Re: Unilang: the Phonology

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001 23:41:23 EDT, David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
wrote:


>If you're looking for opinions, I have one (among several).  First off, I
>think if you really truly wanted to make a truly universal language for
>everyone, you'd have to leave all liquids out completely.  In languages
that
>have some sort of a trill or flap (or approximant), the pronunciation is to
>varied to give it one orthographic representation.  But, you did mention
>this, so let's say that's all right.  What about native speakers of Chinese
>and Korean whose closet approximation is [l]?  And then what about the
>languages that have no [l], where the sound [l] has changed to [d] over
time
>or [w] or even [n] I've heard of?  I would leave [f] out, too, due to its
>odd, labio-dental nature.  But, that's just me.
Good, people have opinions on this :) Now, lemme see; perhaps you didn't
notice too well the latter part of this (from my earlier posting in this
thread):


"1. Ease. All sounds should be roughly approximable by any speaker of any
human language. Distinctions between sounds should be as basic as possible.

2. Renderability. If we were to take only the first point into account, we
might successfully design a language with only the most basic sounds, we
might have to tell the Frenchman that he lives in "Pilanisi", or the
Englishman that he speaks "Inilisi", or something like that. Not quite
acceptable.

The renderability principle obviously is in direct conflict with the
principle of ease; optimality requires a very careful selection of
phonemes, plus some other tricks we might think of."


You see, I've usually been an advocate of a simplistic phonology. Now,
however, I've recognized the need for some flexibility in
an "international" phonology; the unilang should have some phoneme that any
natlang phoneme can be closely approximated to.

Regarding /f/, you may not have noticed that I only defined it as
[+labial], apart from other fricative definitions; that doesn't necessary
make it labio-dental. It can also be a bilabial [P]. If you go back to my
text, you should notice that most sounds have loosely based values, with
more than one possibility in articulation; don't be fooled by the phonemic
notation, that's just symbolism :)

Óskar