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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > on 2/27/02 6:19 AM, Ray Bergmann at rayber@hidden.email wrote: > > Rex >> 1) permissible consonant clusters > > I've been going by instinct so far. All voiced or all > unvoiced, or unvoiced > prededing voiced. Worst clusters I've come up with is > Bdomen (abdomen) and > Kfey (coffee) > > Ray >> In Unish a schwa is understood to separate several > consonants together so "bdomn" would be pronounced > [b`dom`n] if it were Unish. But actually the Unish words > for "abdomen, belly, venter" and "coffee" are "BELI" and > "KOFI". > > In Tx as well I'm expecting schwa-buffering. Another reason why I > opted not to have a schwa phoneme. This is where my question about a "native accent" comes in. People who have a problem with certain consonant clusters will end up with more of a "foreign" accent than those who don't. It seems to me that you are on the road to making the language more appealing to a smaller sub-set of speakers than is absolutely necessary. If you permit words like /mekdanaldz/ (MacDonalds), you're going to have Japanese wanting to say it as /mekkudanarudozu/. (The Japanese name for the chain is Makkudonarudo.) The Japanese language, like many others, doesn't have a real schwa, so I wouldn't expect schwa-buffering from them. I bet lots of Spanish speakers would tend to say "Txiq estu" for "Txiq stu", too. My advice would be to stick with (C)V or, at worst, (C)V(C) syllable shapes, and to constrain vocabulary selection accordingly. Ray's examples of <beli> and <kofi> are so-o-o much more appealing, even to me, than monstrosities (no offense) like <bdomen> and <kfey>. Since all Txeqli words are loan words, I see no reason not to make it a principle that they should be forced to fit the Txeqli phonology, including word-internal syllable stress patterns, whatever those are designed to be. So, if the native stress pattern for a three-syllable word is designed to be medium-light-heavy, then <banana> should be /"ba na 'na/, not /"ba 'na na/, following English /"b@ 'n& n@/. To me, lack of regularity in this area is no more appealing (and no less confusing) than lack of regularity in syntax. I see frequent mention of computer parsing, and this would be much easier with a fully regular prosody. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _______________________________________________________ "When they wired us humans up, they really should have labeled the wires--don't you think?" -- Ed