Re: sabyuka : consonants, orthography, and a few things more

Coming rather late to this discussion.........mainly because I liked the
original post and saw little to criticize (except for that |tz|)....

Julien wrote:
 Political
>>> authority would be given to the best grammarians.
My first thought was:  Chomsky as King of the World????
od.:-((((
OTOH any other grammarian as Máximo Líder probably couldn't do any worse than the
ones we have now. And some (including many of our list-colleagues) might be a
vast improvement. ;-)

>>> Notes :
>>>   - /ts/ is really problematic to me, because I want my system to be
>>> first aesthetic, /ts/ might be in every position, especially final. I
>>> had thought of |ç| and |z|, but I finally decided for |tz| : please
>>> tell
>>> me if you have any better idea :)
It struck me as very odd to introduce a letter |z| used only in this digraph and
nowhere else. As a digraph |ts| is certainly preferable, and the proposals for
|z| make good sense too. (And it would eliminate the necessity for a probable |
t's | across a syllable boundary, assuming that's a possibility in the
language, as appears likely.)
>
>>> Here is the transliteration of the vowel system :
>>> /i/ --> |i|
>>> /e/ --> |e|
>>> /ei/ --> |ê|
>>> /@/ --> |à|
[etc., along with â for /a@/ and ô for /ou/, which I like]
>
>It is to me to me too, and you cannot imagine how hard it is for me to
>write it as |à| ;).
This is a minor, though counter-intuitive, problem, but as you explain--

>Actually, I'm planning to build a website and
>certainly a grammar book, where I would use the a with breve accent
>("accent bref", as in latin if it is not the good word), and long accent
>for diphtongs.
Exactly!! The only problem is that the breve and macron are probably Unicode, which may
not show up (in your website) on everyone's browsers-- though I guess a pdf
would show them; they are of course available in most word-processing programs.
I find your vowel system very interesting. (1) only the low vowels can be
long/diphthongized. (2) it seems ve
ry logical that each low vowel can diphthongize only with its high partner
(3) from an historical POV, there are interesting possibilities as to how
they arose:

a) from original long vowels (somewhat like the Great Vowel Shift of Engl.?)
b) as regularizations of sequences of low V plus _any_ high vowel (this
could be very complicated...)
c) ê and ô clearly could result from earlier *[ai] and *[au] by simple
assimilation; the origin of â however would be a little murky in that case,
though perhaps *[a@] was also possible (the diphthong rule:   /a/ plus any
of the high vowels /i @ u/??)
d) or perhaps they could result from the loss of a consonant (or mysterious
"laryngeal") in *...VCC..., as we see in Port. _feito_, Fr. _fait_ < *factu-

But to make it readable for everyone here, I thought that
>circumflexed letters would be good, and also that |à| could be a
>not-so-bad approximation of schwa (as |@| would be even worse to me).
I agree.

Other questions:  Please post something about the syllable
structure/phontactics.
What triggers gemination of consonants? (I like geminates.) (These two
questions are motivated by my desire to see if the use of the apostrophe can
be eliminated)

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