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On 1/14/06, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > > On Jan 14, 2006, at 6:18 PM, Jim Henry wrote: > > IMO this is an excessively fine phonetic distinction > > to make in an auxlang. > > I must not be clear here. It's the same as Esperanto 'dia' and > 'dja'. What I'm wanting, really, is to have words like Spanish > 'dia' without too complicated a pronunciation and stress system. As you said recently, maybe it was a mistake to drop the semivowel letters and give |i| and |u| two different pronunciations. 1. I think having /di.a/ in phonetic contrast with /dja/ is a bad idea for an auxlang. 2. But if you're going to have contrasts like that, why not have distinct letters for /j/ and /i/? 3. By symmetry with 2, why not also have distinct letters for /w/ and /u/, even if you don't have contrasts like /dwa/ vs. /du.a/? On another topic, have you given any more thought to stabilizing the grammar [and orthography] for a while and trying to write and post a fair amount of stuff in Ceqli, to see how well it works? If you were to stabilize the language, I might would take some time to translate stuff into it -- right now it seems kind of pointless, though. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm