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Please, post this wonderful stuff under a separate page on http://loccan3.wikinet.org/ --- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, Leonardo Castro <leolucas1980@...> wrote: > > I agree that it is a wise choice to start a conlang with few words, > unless one is sure that his/her language will have lots of adherents > (and it is not easy to get them in a list where everybody has his/her > own conlang). Otherwise, it might be an enormous waste of time. If we > had a consensus, we could create it together. > > I had a very long conversation by e-mail with the already famous > anti-Esperantist Justin B. Rye. When I showed him a possible set of > rules to make an alternative to Lojban with phonotactics no more > complex than those of Japanese or Swahili (but still keeping > word-break detection), he answered with a simplified version of it > that was much easier to state: > > 1. Every word can be described by [(C)V(N)] *; > 2. every word begins with C; > 3. every word ends with CV; > 4. every heard sequence CVC must be understood as a word break: -CV C-; > 5. a vowel may be alternatively pronounced as a semivowel when it is > in a cluster with other vowel. > > I was astonished to see how many real words of many languages > are covered by these rules: koala, fauna, Hindi, Kyoto, kanji, la, le, > tu, canto, toada, mango, cauda, pauta, Bantu, Suomi, jambo, bandeira, > Simba, mense, Ruanda, huasi, house (if the "e" were still pronounced > in modern English), geisha, etc. > > It's funny to note that a native anglophone, whose language accept > very complex syllables, would probably find more difficult to > pronounce some of these words than speaker of languages with simpler > phonotactics, because native anglophones pronounce final "o" and "e" > of foreign languages as /ou/ and /ei/, and this would mess the > word-break detection of a conlang with the above mentioned rules. > > *: key to notation below: > C: consonant; > V: vowel; > N: nasal stop (with articulation dependent of the following consonant); > [ ]: repeatable structure; > ( ): optional element; > -: represents the rest of a word. > > > -- > Até logo! > > Leonardo >