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on 5/30/05 10:06 AM, Jim Henry at jimhenry1973@hidden.email wrote: > On 5/30/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: >> Oh, I did kick this alphabet rework around in my head quite a bit. >> Having standard diphthongs does solve the problem of >> too-similar pairs like bien and byen. It also released y and w up >> for other uses. > > The advantage of having distinct letters for the semivowels > is that the learner doesn't have to memorize the set of > diphthongs up front. With your new system, > the learner has to memorize the set of 11 vowel letter pairs that > are to be pronounced as diphthongs before he can pronounce > any word with two or more vowel letters in sequence. Yes. That's why I used y and w for as long as I did, but I've decided that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. OTOH, it's not really that complicated, is it? The rule is that i and u always become semivowels when juxtaposed with another vowel, and the only other thing that has to be stated explicitly is that ui makes WE and iu makes YOU - not OOEY or EEW. > > You also need to be explicit about how to parse sequences of three > or more vowels. For instance, > > caia > > could be pronounced /'tSaj.a/ or /'tSa.ja/, > as far as I can tell (forgive me if I overlooked the part > where you said how to parse these). > I didn't. But I could have: And given three vowels with a semivowel in the middle, the semivowel always goes with the following vowel. Does that cover it? > > You said at some point that ceqli does not use > capital letters. I think you should fix the web pages > to reinforce that by not using capital letters in ceqli > words (except maybe to indicate stress - but I would > prefer to use a preceding ' apostrophe for that). > Quite right. My brain keeps going back to English rules and things get typed that way. Actually, I suppose I should say that Ceqli should appear in either all lower case or all caps. > In the alphabet page your capitalization is fairly > inconsistent. Sometimes you capitalize the first letter, > sometimes the stressed syllable, sometimes the entire word. > > "HEQOG" is probably a typo for "heqoq". Yes -- 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