At first, thank you for reading my language !
>The word 'voiag' looks like it has hard 'g'. Can 'g' be soft in other words?
>Under "Phonetics" it says that G is always [g]. If he's taking "Latin" pronunciations, and not Anglo-Italo-Latin pronunciations, then G will always be hard anyway. It's only when you get into later Latin pronunciations that you get soft Gs.
The word 'voiag' [vojá] is short form of 'voiage' [vojáge].
Based on the so-called gymnastical calculation, it is decided to drop the last syllable 'ge' in pronunciation, but keep the 'g' in the spelling.
'g' cannot be soft, it's either hard [g] as in English 'good' or silent in the ending.
>I see there is an affricate 'c', like the 'z' in 'ezebe'. In that case the 'sc' in 'dechend' changed to 'ch' before 'c' became 'z'.
'c' is hard [k] as in English 'cat'; or silent in the ending.
'z' is for the soft 'c' in Latin, but it's pronounced as [ts] in English 'gets'.
'except' -> 'e-k-cept-' --> (-k- is compensated as final e) ; ( pt become b ) ---> 'e-ze-be'.
'descend' -> 'de-sk-en-d' --> ( -sk- become ch ) ; (verb adds -a ending) --> dechenda ---> (omit last syllable) --> 'dechend'.
I would say it's kind of random choice, when turning 'sc' to 'sk' but ignoring the hidden 's' in 'except'; it is okay to use 'dezend'
>One thing was confusing: I had gotten the impression that he was getting rid of "hard to pronounce" sounds like [l] and [r], and yet his texts are replete with words like "parol". But then he also has words like "io". Seems a little inconsistent.
The final consonant ('l' in 'parol' [pahó]) is kept in the spelling, but not pronounced
'dichover' is pronounced as [dizové]
>Another point of confusion was that he seems to have put himself through an awful regimen of mental gymnastics, just to end up with words that look kinds of like he just whacked off the Latin ending and slightly mangled / weathered the remaining roots a little bit. Or maybe I missed something in the confusing explanation??
As mentioned in the beginning section {Principles: compress Latin words into C-V syllable},
the goal of this design is to fit Latin roots into consonant-vowel-with-nasal (C-V-n) syllable structure.
It is trade-off between several options
1) dropping the character not fit into the (C-V-n) structure, which will lose too much info, cause conflict and hard to remember; think about 'extract' become 'eta'.
2) padding vowels, which will cause too many syllables, and too many repetition of the padding vowel; think about 'extract' become 'ekusuturakutu'
So the way is to choose some "important" character of the dropped ones and merge them into the consonant or the last vowel;
'extract' -> 'e-k-str-a-k-t' -> 'ethato'
both 'k' are dropped
's' is merged with 't' to become 'th' pronounced [dz]
'r' is dropped but represented as a final "-o"
Since the final vowels in Latin words are often dropped in English, it's good to add a final one to "represent" the dropped ones.
Thank you again!