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on 2/14/04 3:24 PM, HandyDad at lsulky@hidden.email wrote: > I've been thinking about Ceqli's phoneme set, and the challenges it > might pose to speakers of Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, etc. > Some of these languages don't have a voiced/unvoiced distinction, > though if they don't they usually have an unaspirated/aspirated > distinction. Also, a lot of the Asian languages only have one liquid, > more often "l" than "r". Could this pose a serious problem? > > I know Latenkwa/Nasendi/Katanda also has a big phoneme set (though > just one native liquid). What have other conlangers concluded about > voiced/unvoiced - unaspirated/aspirated, etc.? > I would say no. We've got it down to the Five Classical Vowels, and, for example, there are no sounds in Ceqli that aren't present in Hindi or English, and, I _think_, Mandarin. We have some consonant clusters that you won't find in M or H, but I don't think they're a problem. As it looks to me, we have a language so far easier to pronounce than Esperanto or Volapük or English. Oh, Mandarin has both L and R. It's Japanese that has only R. Maybe Indonesian only has one. Don't know about other Oriental languages. By and large the 'competitors' of ceqli are harder to pronounce than ceqli is. I include Esperanto and Interlingua, and the big 'natural' auxiliary languages ? English, Arabic, Russian, German, French, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili.... Some conlangs are, indeed, simpler than ceqli. Some allow no consonant clusters, for example. But this results in lack of redundancy and/or Japanese-style lo-o-ong words. -- Rex F. May (Baloo) Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/book-GesundheitDummy.htm