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On Mar 27, 2006, at 9:29 AM, Jim Henry wrote:
On 3/25/06, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote:The discussions going on at the Demos group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/demos-ial-project/Looks kind of neat, but I don't have time to get involved in yet another mailing list right now. Maybe after about July.
Looking forward to your arrival.
Return to the Loglan idea of grammatical particles that have a special shape. This would be CV, and would yield up 65 possible grammar words. Articles, tense and aspect markers, punctuation, things like that.So how many current meanings now expressed with CV roots would have to be changed to some other form?
Ah. Let's see... I guess I have to look up everything from ba thru zu. Probably not a whole lot, actually, and many of them, like vi-vehicle and di-animal have had very little actual use. Ones I hate to lose because they're so neat are fo and ku.
Allow any number of tcwaba at the beginning of a morph, and allow schwa-buffering to make it pronounceable for just about everybody. This would enable word borrowing like ktcpe from ketchup (an extreme example) to be pronounced kuh-chuh-PEH or kuh-tuh-shuh-PE.I'm not too keen on this, since it requires adding another less common vowel in addition to the near-universal five vowels. Also, the very people who might have most trouble pronouncing such clusters are liable to be some of the same people whose native languages don't have schwa.
I have the same doubts, but I wonder about this schwa thing. English has a definite schwa phoneme, and it's often stressed. Now, it wouldnever be stressed in the kind of schwa-buffering I'm thinking about here,
and we have it already to a more limited degree. I have the feeling that a lot of languages without schwa phoneme actually include a lot of schwas here and there. Like, I'm just speculating here, but if you ask a Spanish speaker what sound the letter 'b' makes, what does he say? ba? be? or b+schwa. Rex May rmay@hidden.email See some of my cartoons at: http://homepage.mac.com/rmay/ NOW UPDATED REGULARLY!