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On 3/28/06, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > 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. If you make sure your glossary webpage is sync'd with your private lexicon files, I can write a script to find all such CV morphs. I won't have time for it this week, though. > > 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 would > never 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 But just because your language contains a schwa phone doesn't make it easy for you to pronounce on command in contexts where you're not used to it, if it's not phonemic in your native language. Like many English speakers have nonphonemic initial /C/ in words like "huge", but still have trouble with final /C/ in German "ich" etc. And if you're not used to hearing it phonemically, you might have trouble distinguishing it aurally from /e/ or /a/ -- when other people pronounce /k@.tS@.'pe/ you might hear /ka.tSa.'pe/ and think it's three Tceqli morphemes instead of one. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry