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On 5/12/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > --- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@g...> wrote: > > Rex May - Baloo <rmay@m...> wrote: > > > on 5/6/05 12:40 PM, Jim Henry at jacklongshadow@b... wrote: > > I'm not sure what you mean by "least useful". I have several > > affricates in my own conlang, and I have sometimes thought that, > My reasoning was thus: Among the large languages likely to deliver a > lot of vocabulary to Ceqli, none seem to contrast /Z/ and /dZ/ > except, to a very minor degree, English. Chinese, Hindi, Spanish (in OK, that makes some sense. It would not be a bad thing to talk about that some on the Ceqli site - maybe in an appendix or note at the end of the phonology page. > > > > ...How is the definite article "to" used? > > > I'm afraid I'm relying on instinct here more than knowledge. I > > 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. > Hm. I think in English we regard "God" as a name and "Universe" as a > common noun. I'll work on this. Thanks. I've thought of some other inconsistencies in English article usage that argue against basing any IAL article usage on English. With prepositions, we say "in school" but "in the hospital." Ditto with "to" and "out of". The British on the other hand seem to use "in hospital", "to hospital", etc. in parallel with those prespositions' use with object "school". > > 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. > Ceqli has three kinds of sounds. I probably erred by calling the ones > that can, in clusters of one or more, begin morphemes, "consonants". > Because, of course, as you note, it's an unconventional use of the > term. I picked 'weak' for lmnqryw's because, as you say, they aren't > vowels, but aren't 'strong' enough to begin a morpheme. So I need a > name for each of these sounds. Now, Mandarin has "initials" > and "finals," but that's not quite what Ceqli breaks down into. To > make the rule simple I need a different term for "consonant", I > guess, then weaks and vowels and a term for non-consonant. I like Steve's suggestion of "initial consonant" and "non-initial consonant". Do the semivowels "y" and "w" have different distribution than the other non-initial consonants? If the list of diphthongs you give on the phonology page is exhaustive of all the allowed diphthongs, then I would say yes. You would also need to treat them differently if a semivowel can't follow a liquid or nasal at the end of a morpheme, i.e. if morphemes like these would be illegal: *bany *turw When you write the detailed phonotactic rules for ceqli, you will need to treat y/w as one category, and probably r/l/m/n/q as another category -- I'm not sure if you would need to further distinguish the liquids from the nasals or not. Can you have two liquids or two nasals in a cluster together? e.g. *purlo *gemqi *taqnu If those are illegal clusters, then you probably want a rule or subrule like: liquid + nasal OR nasal + liquid You may also need to distinguish stops, fricatives and affricates among the initial consonants, in order to define the phonotactics of initial clusters. I don't know enough about Italian to know what initial clusters you have in mind as your model. > Or > perhaps I don't need to distinguish between weaks and vowels at all. No, because that would give the impression that any of these liquids, nasals or semivowels can be syllabic, and you could have *pm *bl *kwq *dnr You must distinguish phonemes that cannot occur in the same context into different categories, if you're to have defined phonotactics. Leaving the phonotactics of Esperanto unspecified was a bad idea, although you can tell that I don't consider it a fatal flaw. But there's no sense repeating that mistake unnecessarily. --- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry