[YG Conlang Archives] > [ceqli group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On 5/23/05, Rex May - Baloo <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > on 5/23/05 9:37 AM, Jim Henry at jimhenry1973@hidden.email wrote: > > > On 5/22/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > > And prohibit at least the combos yi, wo, and wu. > > Probably a > > good idea. Maybe "ye" as well? It was the one > that started this whole > > thread, after all > > Sort of. Xye, sye, cye, of course. But what about a word like byen? To > me it's clearly different from ben. I think for an English speaker, the > fact that a consonant follows the 'e' makes a difference, somehow. Or, I > could prohibit the ye, and words of that sort would turn into two syllables > - byen vs. biEN - which, frankly, sound pretty much alike to my ear. I'm > willing to make that change if there's general agreement that it won't hurt > anything. "for an English speaker" is maybe the operative phrase here. ceqli should be easy to pronounce for a wider range of people than just speakers of English and similar languages, if I understand your design goals correctly. Having both "byen" and "bien" ocur would probably be a bad idea; they don't contrast strongly enough. Having "ie" in some words and "ye" in others might be similarly confusing. Maybe you should forbid any sequence of two vowels that could be easily confused with a permitted diphthong. So since you allow "wa" there could be no words with "ua", etc. > One more consideration. Ceqli makes many opposites by reversal, which > consists of keeping the cwaba initial group, and then reversing the order of > the following faloba: > > bimyo - subtle, boymi - obvious > dina - honest, dani - dishonest Interesting. I had not noticed anything about that in the web pages. Did I overlook it or have you not documented it yet? It's similar to the way Solresol formed its opposites, but here you don't have the Solresol problem of changing the classifier morpheme. You might have potential problems of collision between words, however, unless you're very careful and/or forbid users of the language to form their own ad-hoc opposites in this way - which implies there should be another (probably less terse) way to form opposite terms ad-hoc. > Now, I'd like to allow for some more offbeat clusters in some of the > resulting reversals: > > dalam - deep, dmala - shallow > > It's easy for me. Just like the name Dmitri, which lots of Anglophones can > say quite easily. > > Reactions? I would say you should not allow clusters in "opposite" terms that you haven't documented as permissible in the basic phonotactic rule set. Presumably "dalam" and "dmala" will both have independent lexicon entries, and there's no way for a learner to know which one you came up with first and which one you derived by reversing the faloba sequence. But maybe the occurence of initial stop + nasal is a clue to the learner that there also exists an opposite term for this morpheme (assuming such faloba-reversal opposites can't be formed ad-hoc). -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm