[YG Conlang Archives] > [ceqli group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
on 7/8/05 10:44 AM, Jim Henry at jimhenry1973@hidden.email wrote: > On 7/8/05, Rex May - Baloo <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: >> I'm still agonizing over letter names. How do these seem? >> >> pao >> beu >> tea >> doa >> kae >> geo >> >> feo >> vae >> seu >> zao >> xoa >> yea >> >> hei >> cae >> joe > > They're fairly distinct from each other. But for pronominal usage > I think monosyllables work better. > > And it may be too late for this (too many words in the > lexicon already to have collisions with), but an easy rule for remembering > letter names would be nice. Something like > unvoiced consonants get a name which is the named consonant > plus "-al", while voiced consonants get "-un" -- or whatever > suffixes you might find that sound distinct and don't cause collision with > existing words. That would keep > letter names fairly distinct for spelling out loud in noisy environments, > but be easy to learn and remember. Yes, there's got to be a middle ground somewhere. Loglan has all names in -ei, I think, and -ai for capitals if I remember right, and that's not redundant enough. Lojban just follows everything with schwa, also not redundant, and a danger of clashing with schwa-buffering. And if you get redundant enough, there's a bit of a burden on the memory. Here's a thought. use -eu for all of them. Eu being pronounced as in Esperanto neutrala. Or maybe, following your notion, -eu for voiced and -ui for unvoiced. One final idea is to use the really unused -w. I can't imagine what sound to assign to it that would be both pronounceable and obscure enough that we'd never need it for anything other than letters. Maybe we could distinguish between a minimal schwa for buffering and a full schwa for -w. -- 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