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on 5/27/05 10:19 AM, Jim Henry at jimhenry1973@hidden.email wrote: > 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. You do. Part of the problem here is stress. Stress falls on the penultimate vowel if the morpheme ends in a vowel. If it doesn't end in a vowel, the stress falls on the last vowel. That means: bien is pronounced bi-EN, byen BYEN, which sound too much alike, right. So if we say no ye's allowed, analagous problems like bi-AN vs. BYAN, bi-ON vs BYON, and Bi-UN vs. BYUN don't, frankly, seem as similar as the first. Agree? It seems like the change of articulation point differentiates ia from ya, etc. Anyhow, I'm now convinced that ye as well as yi, wo, and wu, shd be disallowed. > > 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. Yes, except for the stress rules again. bwa is pronounced BWA, and bua pronounce BU-a. > >> 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? Probably not on the current page. > > 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. > I see no reason not to allow adhocs, in that good ones will survive and awkward ones won't. And the non-terse way is with the prefix po - pobon = bad. > >> 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). Either allow it or not allow it. Hm. Thing is, I can't really come up with a clear rule about what seems okay to me and what doesn't. I'm inclined to like dm, kn, gn, pn, bn, at least. -- Rex F. May (Baloo) Visit my website at: http://homepage.mac.com/rmay/ Great leadership training for boys at: http://afewgoodkids.com Strange language from an alternate universe at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Texperanto.html