Re: [engelang] phonology - engelang messages

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:47 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 17/09/2012 06:07:

> - Tones need vowels, mainly. Xorban formally pretends that predicate
> stems don't have vowels,

Yes and no. /@/ in the environment C@C doesn't count as a "V" for Xorban's morphological rules, but that doesn't mean that at a phonological level stems don't have vowels.

But the formalism doesn't contain /@/ at all. Maybe I should have said "Xorban formally pretends that predicate stems don't have phonological vowels"?

> and lots of times they actually don't. So no matter how you slice and
> dice the "words", all the distinctions that tones could make right
> now would effectively be among closed class morphemes i.e. variables
> and operators. We don't really need to do that, precisely because
> they are closed class. In other words Xorban as it stands is a poor
> candidate for tonalization AFAICT.

I don't see a problem here. Ifonly word-final vowel-sequences bear low tone, then /@/ in the environment C@C will always bear high tone, i.e. will never be tonally contrastive.

It's not a problem; it's just that, if I understand your idea, I don't see a significant net benefit in using tones to (effectively) increase the number of closed class morphemes. The average CCM would undoubtedly be shorter, but we'd be asking everyone to learn something they're not accustomed to, and stems would still be C(@)C((@)C)* (which is exactly the sort of constraint that I came up with the L/H idea in order to obviate). But maybe the benefit of your idea is more than I imagine.

> - If we wanted to put vowels back in Xorban predicate stems, then we
> would have a good reason for tonalization.

Rather, the tone system would make it possible to rethink the morphological rules for phonological patterns within words.

I've snipped your suggestions for what the patterns could be. I have my own (inchoate) ideas, too. But is it worth the effort of exploring them if the consensus is that tone gets the thumbs down?

Possibly. I'd be interested to see whatever you cook up.

But I do think we should be thinking about the issue of tone before investing too much effort in working on the current morphology that's based on toneless phonology.

The morphology is so simple and the number of closed class morphemes so small that I don't think it would take any Herculean effort to give Xorban a new "skin". Morneau used to tinker day to day with parts of his relatively more complex MTIL, and then every few months, completely burn down his morphology and rebuild it from practically from scratch. The only thing that killed him is that each time that he did that, he had a substantial vocabulary that he had to refit into the new morphology.

And that's where a real rub is: We would need to finalize the phonology and morphology if we were to start designing the lexicon.

> <x, q> for /G, ?/ is less weird than <'> for /h/. Also less
> unwarranted.
>
> IMVHO they're all weird.

<'> has the additional weirdness of not being a letter, tho ther's orthographic precedent of it representing a schwa interconsonantally and [?].

Maybe it's worth considering <'> for the schwa and <q> for [?]. Then in my compounding scheme, the buffer vowel [y] would always be implicit (and often silent), and the hyphen vowel [9]/[@] would be represented by a lightweight punctuation mark.

As far as <h>, there is some precedence for it standing for [h\], so maybe that should be the letter assigned to [G], if that phoneme where added, leaving <x> for [h] or [x]. I know that <x>=[x] is pretty screwy for the Roman alphabet (except for archaic forms of Spanish), but it is easy to remember from Cyrillic.

>> As far as /w y/ which slightly confusingly are [y 9] as in Loglan,
>> although I know one is going to agree with this, I would use them
>> in stems in the following way.
>>
>> stem := (y) root (y root)* root := C (w) C ( (w) C )*
>>
>> /y/ would not be elidable,
>
> A stem would begin with unelidable /9/?
>
> That <y> would be elided if the onset were pronounceable, or if
> preceded by another word, and it wouldn't have to be spelled either
> way.

You could also have roots consisting of wC, where the initial w is obligatorily deleted following a vowel.

Yes, that would be equivalent.

>> The way I look at it, the reason that most of them start with the
>> glottal stop follows from a more general rule that all syllables
>> start with a non-null onset.
>
> Wouldn't it be more meaningful to say "the reason that all of them
> start with a consonant follow from a more general rule that all words
> start with a consonant"? Or would you rather not consider /./ a
> consonant?
>
> I think the intent of Lojban .uV, .iV is that the onset be .u, .i and
> the nucleus be the V, so the /./ isn't necessarily filling an
> otherwise empty onset -- tho if V are always nuclei then your
> formulation works.
>
>
> I think that Lojban's intent is made clear by things such as forms
> like <ia> being called "diphthongs", semivowels being spelled the
> same way as vowels, and semivowels not counting as consonants for the
> purpose of defining brivla boundaries. (Granted there are no rafsi
> like "kua" without the apostrophe to test this, but if there were,
> then my understanding is that they would be treated like CVV and not
> CCV; cf. "tai", not analyzed as CVC.)

Your arguments make sense. The specification of Lojban is too incomplete to really resolve the question. One unexplored possibility is that i,u are both consonants and vowels and some generalizations ostensibly pertaining to consonants or vowels should in fact be recast as generalizations pertaining to nonvowels or nonconsonants. I'm not proposing we have that discussion.