Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 10:00:56PM -0400, Matt Trinsic wrote:
>
>>Mark,
>>Okaikiar sounds interesting. Is there anywhere online to see a
>>description or more information on it? I have always been fascinated by
>>syllabaries, how does yours work? Coincidentally.
>
>
> I'm working on an online description of Okaikiar.  The actual language
> stuff is still incomplete, but you can see and play with the writing system
> here:
>
> http://thereeds.org/~mark/conlang/okaikiar/script.rhtml
Wow, now that is an ingenious scheme for creating the symbols. I love it
=) Great way to avoid having to avoid having to memorize hundreds of
syllables. One question though, would it be possible for two different
syllables to end up with the same pattern? Although I'm not so sure that
would be a bad thing. Remembering to add the requisite amount of
'messiness' for a natlang has always been one of the difficult parts for me.

>
>>from a weekend trip during which I decided to add a voiced TH/
>>non-voiced Th distinction to slaalehg ihkreen, as most of the other
>>phonemes did make that distinction.
>
>
> As Christophe pointed out when I was going through this, that's no reason.
> Languages are notoriously inconsistent in their phoneme inventory;
> in the case of [T]/[D], English doesn't distinguish them phonetically
> even though it makes that distinction elsewhere. :)
>
> (English has both sounds but they're not phonemically distinct; initial
> and medial "th" is always [D] while final "th" is always [T]).
>
> -Mark
Yes, and ive worked on getting over that 'English Block' of thinking of
them as the same sound.