Re: The Next Step (was Vulcan in Vulcan)
Saul Epstein 
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 08:26:14 -0500

At 10:47 PM 10/21/97 -0500, Rob wrote:

>At 09:33 PM 10/21/97 -0500, Saul wrote:
>
>>I'd be happy to help do the tally. Maybe we should come up with a way
>>to divide the lexicon amongst those wanting to help -- unless Rob's
>>gotten industrious and done it already!
>
>Well, used to work at the Air Force Human Resources Lab, where my main job
>was to write simple one use, or several use statistical programs. So it
>occurs to me I could dig out one of my frequency distribution programs 
>and modify it a bit. So it would say print out a frequency list of 
>vowels, consonents and vowel/consonent clusters; and a list of phonological
>rules like CCVV. The from the list we can come up with some more generalized
>rules. 

Smashing!

>>I'd like to suggest the following alternative notation for the
>>transcription of Vulcan, adapted from the ZC:
>>
>>VOWELS
>>
>>ii i				u uu
>>	ee		oo
>>	e		o
>>		^
>>		^^
>>	aa		a
>>
>>i	pit (Brit English)		ii	mean (Brit English)
>>u	put (Brit English)		uu	prune (Brit English)
>>e	set (Brit English)		ee	prenez (French)
>>o	not (Brit English)		oo	fault (Brit English)
>>^	but (Brit English)		^^	sir (Brit English)
>>a 	patte (French)			aa	?
>
>The double letters bug me for some reason. But it does look a 
>little better than using punctuation characters to designate.

The colon is adapted from a similar mark that tradition uses to indicate
length in phonetic transcriptions. But it leads to confusion if you're
trying to write out sentences making use of punctuation.

The only alternative would be to find a letter we aren't using and use it.
Unfortunately, I don't think there are any. Or use capitals, but I think
that's already been rejected.

When using ANSI, for word-processed documents or web-pages, we can, of
course, use "acute" vowels instead -- letters with an "accent" mark over
them. It's not my preferred diacritic for this, but there's one available
for each vowel in the standard set, so we wouldn't need a special font.

>>the corresponding "short" vowel. What I want to get at here, though,
>>is that the current lexicon has no examples of nasalized vowels. So
>>I'm wondering if they're phonemic or if each vowel has a nasalized
>>allophone. If the latter is true I don't need to worry about having
>>to write e~, etc.
><snip>
>
>Well the heading in that section does read the "phonemics" and he started
>the second section as "Section 2: Minimal contrastive pairs for phonemics 
>will be provided at a later date.". That seems to make it pretty clear
>that the items described constitute phonomes not phonetic symbols.

I know. And we can treat the nasals as separate phonemes if we want to. It
will make for an ENORMOUS vowel inventory, compared to a typical Terran
language. Having separate long and short phonemes is large as it is. 

>>CONSONANTS
><snip>
>
>I like the consonents, it makes much more sense to me also. Especially
>using c for "sh", and j for "zh"; and using ts, ks and x. 
>
>Rob Z.

OK. That makes 2,5 aye and 0 nay. Anyone else?

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty <at> uit <dot> net
www <dot> johnco <dot> cc <dot> ks <dot> us <slash> <tilde> sepstein
"Surak ow'pha:per the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pha:dzhar the's'hi surakecha'."
					-- K'dvarin Ursw~l'at