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Rex May - Baloo <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > on 5/6/05 12:40 PM, Jim Henry at jacklongshadow@hidden.email wrote: > > > > > http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/alph.htm > > > > Why is glottal stop not listed among the consonants or among the > > vowels? Does it occur anywhere except in the names of vowels, > > semivowels and weaks? > > Good point. I don't intend for it to be phonemic. Perhaps the glottal > stop is unnecessary. I've thought of restricting the "he" for naming the In any case, if you decide to keep using it, you should list it among the consonants (or weaks?) in the phonology page. > non-consonant letters and perhaps for "Ceqli-izing" some foreign words, but > I'm not quite sure about the latter. What do you think? Would it make > sense to maybe have "he" as a separate word entirely? Used only for naming > these letters? Then they would be written with a space he a, he e, etc. That might work well. A glottal stop would make those more pronouncable, I reckon. > > Your specification of what consonant clusters are allowed is pretty > > vague. > > I haven't formulated it yet, really, but so far I'm relying on what I think > is maximally pronounceable. I'm thinking of saying that if you can have a > cluster in Italian, you can have it in Ceqli. That still sounds too vague. Most students of ceqli will not be familiar enough with Italian to konw what that means. It would be better to specify a rule (or several rules, one for initial, one for medial and one for final clusters), or a simple list of allowed clusters, as in Lojban. > > "We don`t know what any of it means..." > > > > Shouldn't that be "don't"? > > To begin with, somehow I couldn't do an apostrophe in html, so I used that > sign as the closest thing I could find. I'll try again. Maybe I > misunderstood the method. This ' is usually used for apostrophe. It will show up correctly on browsers where fancier apostrophe glyphs will not be displayed correctly. > > This page glosses "C" and "J" as alveolar affricates, but > > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ceqli/message/1318 > > describes them as plain fricatives. Which is correct? > > > This has changed a couple of time. At this point, and I'm sure it'll stay > that way, x = /S/, c = /tS/, and j = /dZ/. There is no letter for plain > /Z/. Can't fit it in with the 26 letters, and I thought it the least useful > of the consonant sounds. I'm not sure what you mean by "least useful". I have several affricates in my own conlang, and I have sometimes thought that, if I were willing to redesign a lot of words, eliminating the affricates (or maybe having a contrast only between unvoiced fricatives and voiced affricates) would make a lot of morphemes more readily distinguishable. So, for instance, contrast /S/ with /dZ/ and leave out /Z/ and /tS/, and ditto with the palatal and bilabial fricatives/affricates... But I've started attaining some real fluency in it, so I don't want to scrap dozens of words I've already learned and make new ones. > > http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/gramintro.html > > ...How is the definite article "to" used? > > > I'm afraid I'm relying on instinct here more than knowledge. I originally > thought "to" would be used like Loglan "le," but since then I've tried to > Mandarinize a lot of it, and make such words as 'the' more optional. Answer > is, I'm not sure. Only that it does, perhaps among other things, mean "the > one already mentioned or known about." Go xaw jino kay jini. To jino gi > kom. I see a man and a woman. The man is eating. Just saying "Jino gi > kom" would allow for the possiblity that you're talking about some other > man. But I'm wide open to suggestions and comments about the the problem. I'm not sure I can help with a lot of specifics, but I do strongly feel that if you're going to have a definite article in an IAL or loglang, you should define its usage rather than vaguely saying it's the same as in some natlang. Just for one instance of how English article use is irregular, take words like "God" and "universe". In most contexts, there's only one we could be talking about, so it doesn't make sense to pick out one among others; but for some reason we say "God" with no article and "the universe" with a definite article. > > "Blu se fawl - Blue bird " > > > > Is this a typo for "Blu sa fawl"? You haven't explained "se". "se" > > also occurs several times unexplained in other contexts (both > > stand-alone and suffixed) where I would expect "sa" based on what you > > have said so far. > > Yes. For awhile, I considered allowing terminal -e to be pronounced schwa. > I abandoned that because of likely confusion with with terminal -a. So se > became sa, and they didn't all get changed. OK. I think there are other archaic instances of "se" on various other pages of your site, too. Also: when you next revise the dictionary, I suggest you have an entry for "se" indicating it is an archaic form of "sa". That way old texts will still be readable. When Ms. Kisa removed some words from Toki Pona, she eliminated all mention of them from the official site, and some older texts would be rather enigmatic if one of the fan sites did not have a helpful page listing archaic words. > > "Sala taylho solgu. Recommend, join army." > > > > Is "taylho" a typo? You said earlier that the phonology doesn't allow "h" > > after another consonant. > > > No, this is okay. "L" is a weak, not a consonant. That brings up another point I was a bit puzzled about. Do you have any source for this terminology of calling the stops and fricatives "consonants" and the liquids and nasals "weaks" (and considering them non-consonants)? Phonologically, they're still consonants, because they never form a syllable nucleus as a vowel can. It might be clearer to say that words can start with a stop or fricative, followed by one or more vowels, semivowels, liquids and nasals. --- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry