Re: auxlang for "foreign telephone operators"

Pavel A. da Mek sikayal:

> >This reminds me of something I read in a book on an auxlang:
>
> >> The units begin with G, decades with J, and higher orders with Z.
> >>  The ten vowels are (in order)
> >> ay, ee, eye, aw, ow. ah, eh, ih, a (as in cat) and oh.
> [snip]
This language is unbelievably awful.  What a terrible idea for an auxlang.
Doesn't this person know anything about redundancy?  I find it especially
appalling that he used [dZ] and [z] for making these contrasts, since
they're relatively likely to be confused.

> Well, imagine following language:
[snip]

This one is even worse.  I can barely distinguish that many vowels
consistently, and my native lang (English) has lots of them, and I
practice my phonetics a lot.

> But this is real-world auxlang used in many countries.
> The "foreign telephone operators" will understand,
> if you will carefully pronounce vowels with these formants:
Unfortunately, I'm not in conscious control of my formants, and I'm not in
the habit of recording my own speech for analysis.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

Reply