Re: [engelang] Re: Engelang phonology chat

I believe that in French the schwa is sometimes considered an allophone of /9/.  In German, I don't know if it's considered an unstressed allophone of /E/, but it sure sounds like it to my ears. 

In my English, the schwa is pronounced exactly like an unstressed version of "short u" as in <cut>; most Brits keep a pretty clear contrast TTBOMK.

Romanian is one of the few languages I know of that have phonemic schwa not mixed up with anything else.

In my reform of Lojban, which I named Tikybau, which I was working on until about a week ago, I decided I needed seven vowels, so I considered the following systems:

/a e i o u @ 1/ - similar to Lojban, except that Lojban does not define [1] for its seventh vowel, even though that's plainly the only practical choice for a seventh given the sanctioned allophonic ranges of the other six.

/a E i O u e o/ - similar to Italian.  Sounds nice, but too hard for too many people IMHO.

/a e i o u 9 y/ - this is like French with the /E/~/e/ contrast leveled or German with the /E/~/e:/ contrast leveled.

The way the vowel system in Lojban works is this: /a e i o u/ are normal vowels; the 6th vowel /@/ is a "hyphen" vowel, and the 7th vowel /1/ is a "buffering" vowel.  (It's not too important for this discussion to know exactly what these functions are.)  The 6th tends to occur mostly in unstressed syllables, and the 7th would appear only in unstressed syllables, if it were actually used;  in practice I am guessing it's rare or nonexistent partially due to its useless definition. 

I decided to make the sixth vowel /9/ (with the allophone [@] allowed in unstressed syllables due to its frequency).  /y/ is the seventh vowel, which sees more use in Tikybau than in Lojban.  My reasoning is this: if people can pronounced /a e i o u/ with rounded back vowels and unrounded front vowels, with a little practice, people can pronounce /y 9/ too, and therefore that's probably the best choice if you want seven vowels.