Re: Tsuhon: tentative phonology

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Mainly to Yoon Ha:
Meep!  :-)

> There is a list with German sound changes here:
>
> http://www.linguist.de/Deutsch/gdsmain.html
> (In German).
I can probably wade through the German with dictionary help.  :-)  Thanks
muchly!  Will look into it when there's time.

[snip]
> Still one diphthong left... :-) There are still other diphthongs as I
> said, but this explains why it is `huus' (`Haus') but `baam' (`Baum'):
> the Middle High German words were `huus' and `boum'.
>
> Another problem is that in all times, there are (reconstructed)
> diphthongs, so your problem remains.  I'd probably go for a
> simplification then.  Something like this:
>    /au/ >  /a:/
>    /aI/ >  /E:/
>    /OI/ > */Q:/ > /E:/
>
> or maybe
>    /OI/ > /O:/
The other thing I was thinking was maybe just use series of vowels.
Japanese already has things like "aoi," doesn't it?  So perhaps the
diphthongs would be "split" into separate but adjacent vowels.  I'll
think about it.  :-)

> I don't know how likely these are, but in Korean loan words, at least
> one is common: Taiwan > tae-man.
Korean loan words?  <puzzled meep>

> Then you'd probably get:
>    Haus   > haasu
>    Baum   > maasu     (? do you have b?)
>    klein  > kuleenii  (if you keep Japanese adjective endings)
B?  Yes.  I need to read up a bit more on Japanese before I start
figuring out specifics.

> I'd also drop final -e from most words (typical for spoken German
> anyway):
>
>    Keule > *keul > koolu
>                 or keelu
>
> Just suggestions of course! :-)
And I'm grateful for them.  =^)  Just dropping -e from words would leave
funky endings that don't fit into a mostly-Japanese phonology, though
maybe that's something to reconsider.  OTOH I *do* plan to keep the
-u/-ru verb endings (I hope I remembered that correctly), so I'm
wondering how to make non-verbs look, well, not like verbs.

Speaking of which, I seem to vaguely remember that when Latin went to the
Romance languages, most of the words got stuck in accusative? case.  For
German to Tsuhon, I was wondering if I should use any particular
form--plural sounded attractive just to get rid of gender (which I don't
want to keep).

YHL

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