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--- 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