Re: [engelang] Engelang phonology chat - engelang messages

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 8:32 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 25/08/2012 04:10:

> Moving this off the Xorban Dev thread because this is a side decussion.
>
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 12:03 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote:
>
> Mike S., On 24/08/2012 03:13:
>
> > Let compounds be merely a concatenation of the stems. It doesn't matter if, say, CCCC is ambiguous between CC+CC and CCCC, or CCCCC between CC+CCC and CCC+CC: compounding would be a purely mnemonic way of forming novel predicates, derivationally translucent.
> >
> >
> > I know you disagree, but I don't think it harms anything to have a
> > compound hyphen that derives non-fully-compositional compounds. There
> > could also be other hyphens to produce the fully compositional
> > meanings based on the suffix. Given Xorban's syntax with overt
> > variables and binary operators, we could potentially avoid a lot of
> > verbosity via such shortcuts. Something to put on the back burner for
> > now, of course.
>
> I'm all for something that creates brevity. But a compound hyphen reduces brevity.
>
> There are going to be vowels in these consonant strings. Some of them can be hyphens. If you compound br- and nt- without a hyphen, you can get things like br@nt or b@rn@t or b@r@n@t. If you compound them with an o-hyphen then you get bront or b@ron@t. If you combine them in the opposite order you get non-hyphened n@t@b@r or n@tbr- and hyphened n@tobr-. If planned well, hyphens will not reduce much brevity in the CCC* system.

Jorge's {z} hyphen adds length by adding an extra syllable. Your {o} hyphen adds length by increasing the frequency with which multivowel variables are needed: i.e. length not to the particular sentence but to the average sentence length.

Yes, having to reallocate a V-space variable is indisputably a disadvantage.

What about a compromise? What if the form of roots were constrained as follows:

root := (S) (F) (P) (P) (F) (S)

P:= p | b | t | d | k | g
F:= f | v | s | z | c | j | x
S:= m | n | l | r

...and predicates were combined from one or more roots:

predicate-stem:= ( ë root )( ë root )*

In other words, the epenthetic schwa /ë/ itself would be the hyphen. Because all Xorban words end in a vowel, the initial ë could be eliminated whenever following another word.

I pretty much got this idea from Xorban numerals. The schwas could be written with <'> or <.> <nm'p'd'tr> or <nm.p.d.tr> = "123".

A further optional compromise is this: The schwa-placement rule is to be only weakly enforced. That it, it is still licit to insert or delete [ë] between consonants at will. In those cases, the correct predicate is grokked from context. In practice, this would probably affect human comprehension little.

> > consonants, probably one for each remaining letter of the 26-letter alphabet, /b c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x z/. Assuming Lojban phonetic values, that leaves values needed for <h q w>. Obvious phonetic values are gap-filling velar nasal and voiced velar fricative, and glottal stop, which Lojban has (but with very limited phonotactic distribution). for slightly better grapheme assignment, use <h> for [x], <x> for [S], <q> for [?], and <w> for [G] and <c> for [N] or vice versa.
> >
> > That's efficient, but ugly. Is it forbidden for loglangs to use
> > Unicode? If I were competing for Prettiest Romanization Award and not
> > worried about convenience, I'd make Lojban look like the eastern
> > European language that it sounds like:
>
> The attraction of choosing the graphemes first is that it's (arguably) easier to reach a consensus on having 26 graphemes (because that's what most versions of roman provide) than to reach a consensus on phonemes. Given the paramount goal of brevity without information loss, there'd be pressure to have the phoneme inventory as large as possible, where the limits of possibility are when the phonetic distinctions are too difficult for most people to maintain. I think it'd be hard to reach consensus on where that limit lies.
>
> FWIW, Livagian has 21 unaccented consonants, 4 accented consonants, 7 unaccented vowels and 8 accented vowels -- 21 consonants and 7 vowels if you take only the unaccented. So that gives a sense of where I strike the balance.
>
>
> That's not too elaborate. If you had accented consonants, then I
> assume that syllables had two mora, so you probably had long vowels
> too. Correct?
>
> Other than throwaway sketches, the most elaborate phonology I ever
> tinkered with had of all things a largely Latinate a_posteriori
> lexicon. The three series of plosives allowed me to practice my VOTs.
> That would be 21 consonants and 8 vowels if you count the aspirated
> plosives (which I formally analyzed as /p t k/ + /h/). The vowels
> took high or low pitch; low pitch marked the end of a word.

I like your tone scheme.

BTW, only 4 of Livagian's consonants are plosives [b d g ?] <p t k q>. All sorts of other phonation contrasts can arise allophonically, but only when optional schwa-elision creates clusters. E.g. /k/+/h/ = [kh]; /k/+/q/ = [k'].