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Re: "se" and "sa"



--- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, Rex May - Baloo <rmay@m...> wrote:
> on 2/15/04 2:21 PM, HandyDad at lsulky@r... wrote:
> 
> > "se" and "sa" are likely to occur a lot, and in close proximity.
> > Would it be better if they sounded a little less similar? 
Different
> > consonant or different vowel?
> 
> First, 'sa' would be a direct borrowing from French, which is 
rather nice.
> Second, for a while I considered borrowing 'de' out of Mandarin for 
the 'se'
> meaning.  I decided against it mostly because in Mandarin 
it's /d@/, not
> /dE/.  But if we do decide to make the words less similar, that's 
the route
> I'd take.  What do you think?
> 
> To kom pan se xyen
> vs.
> To kom pan de xyen
> 
"si", "di", or "de" would work okay. Any of them free and not in 
conflict with a planned word-form series? I like "di" or "de" better 
because stops seem to take just a bit less time to say than 
sibilants. They seem to flow better. 

"sa" should stay the same, I strongly agree.

Hey! I just thought of something. You know how we agreed that two-
letter "-e" words couldn't take a schwa sound because it would be 
needed by people who can't say, for example, "zbano" (was that the 
word?). If the only such words were ones that begin with a stop, then 
they couldn't be confused with schwa in a word-initial consonant 
cluster, because a stop can't be the first letter in a word-initial 
consonant cluster; only a fricative can. I haven't thought it all 
through yet, but I think that would mean that schwa could return as 
an allophone of [e].

--Krawn