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Rex May - Baloo wrote: > > Do away with y & w? I'm open to it. Let's see what the effects would be. > > As far as diphthongs are concerned, we'd need rules like: > > iV and uV always form a diphthong, But not 'ii' and 'uu', don't you agree? Otherwise, you're introducing vowel length, which might be a bit much. > as do ai, ei, oi, au, eu. > Other 2-vowel combinations do not form diphthongs. > > Three-vowel combinations can be triphthongs, provided the middle element is > not i or u. > > uai - why > iau - yow! Actually, I would allow only those two. > but > > aiu - ah-you > ewa - eh-wah > > No longer could we import words like Spanish día, because one thing we're > all agreed about is no diacritics, and dia would be pronounced dyah. > > We'd either have to disallow 'ao' or insist on a glottal stop in the middle, > because I, for one, con't seem to distinguish pau from pao. I would disallow it. Japanese distinguishes them (and 'ai' vs. 'ae'), but they are not diphthongs in Japanese, they are syllabic. Also, 'ou' and 'ei', I'd think. In a true diphthong, they'd be might hard for many people to distinguish from 'oo' and 'ee', respectively. After all, Ceqli is not being designed as a training tool for budding phoneticians, is it? I'd go for a list, rather than trying to come up with an algorithm for generating them. -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net _____________________________________________________ "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese." -- Charles de Gaulle