Re: Dropping Q and C (was: Some isolating verb patterns)

On Monday, January 17, 2005, at 07:11 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
>> On Sunday, January 16, 2005, at 11:35 , B. Garcia wrote:
[snip]
>>> I personally dig using K wherever possible.
>>
>> So do I   :)
>
> I've been known to use both - Meghean uses 'c', but most of my other
> conlangs
> use 'k' for /k/. Classical Vaikin, in a 'bout of exceeding boringness
> uses 'k'
> for /k/ and 'c' for /c/.
So Classical Vaikin uses them exactly like Bax.   :-)

It may be a tad boring following the practice of Indonesian and IPA, but i
see nothing wrong with it.

Yes, I tend to use both letters - |k| to denote /k/, and |c| for some
other purpose, since natlangs already give us a wide range of sounds to
choose from (see below).

[snip]

>> Maybe you mean non-Anglo-Romance    ;)
>
> Well, 'k' isn't exactly rare in English either, is it?
Not as common as it was in Middle Welsh   :)

Yes, |k| is more common in English than it is in the Romancelangs, where
it is usually confined to foreign words and the metric prefix kilo-. But,
unlike the other Germanic langs, |k| is not the 'normal' or most common
spelling of /k/ in English; it is more often spelled |c|.

>
>>> I just reckon C's underrated, that's all ;)
>>
>> How so? While K almost invariably denotes only /k/ in both natlangs and
>> conlangs, C has had a great time denoting all sorts of other sounds such
>> as /s/, /ts/, /tS/, /S/, /dZ/, /T/, /|\/ and, I am sure, some others
>> besides /k/ - not bad for a letter than began its life as /g/   :)
>
> In Swedish before front vowels, 'k' denotes the phoneme traditionally
> transcribed as /C/, most commonly realized as [s\] (but [S] in my 'lect).
Yes, I knew that before front vowels |k| was 'softened' in the
Scandinavian langs (Isn't it /tC/ in Danish) - that's one reason I said
"almost invariably" and just plain "invariably".  But I was unsure whether,
  for example, the Swedish /C/ was a distinct phoneme or an allophone of /k/
. Does /k/ in fact ever occur before front vowels in the scandinavian
langs.

In fact of course the treatment of |k| in the Scandinavian langs must
reflect very much what was going on in Vulgar Latin with |c| in the first
two or three centuries CE.

While I can readily think of examples of conlangs that use |c| = /k/ - for
example Quenya and Sindarin (tho Quenya follows Latin in having /kw/
spelled |qu| and not |cw|) - these languages do not use |k|. Normally if a
conlang does use |k|, it is to represent /k/. The only exception that I
know of is Acadon which uses |c| for /k/, |q| for /kw/ and |k| for /kj/.

And |q| is another of those pesky letters that are not really needed in
the modern Roman alphabet, and it tends to be put to other uses in
natlangs, for example: [q] (Innuit), [c] (Albanian), [?] (Maltese), [ts\_h]
  (Pinyin), [!\] (Zulu and Xhosa) inter_alia. Even the |qu| combo is not
the same everywhere: it may be /kw/, /kP/, /kv/ or just plain /k/.

In conlangs it is often used to denote [N], but I know of no natlang that
does this. In Speedwords it has the value /kw/ as it does in Acadon; but I
am not persuaded that _qu_ [kwu:] ("that, which" [relative}) would in
practice be readily distinguished from _ku_ [ku:] ("contain, include").

Ray
=======================================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
=======================================================
"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

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