[YG Conlang Archives] > [ceqli group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
on 2/15/04 5:38 PM, HandyDad at lsulky@hidden.email wrote: > --- 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]. Hey, this may be a great idea. I've replaced 'se' with 'de' in the grammar intro. How's it look? Only bunch of words I've got that break the rule are ts-words, mostly from German. As 'tsan,' tooth. How about it and others become 'zan'? Just a thought. -- 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