Dipthongs and other things (was Re: Arrghhhh!!!! and a Summary Rob Zook Thu, 27 Nov 1997 12:48:08 -0600 At 11:36 PM 11/26/97 -0600, Saul wrote: > [snip] > >> [approximate]+[tap]: >> lr yr wr > >Yikes. How did those sneak in? Well, during my follow up to your analysis of initial word consonant clusters I tossed all three of the following sets at the end. [fricative]+[approximate]: vl zl jl xl fl sl cl hl [nasal]+[tap]: mr nr nyr ngr [approximate]+[tap]: lr yr wr They received no comment the first time, so I thought I'd toss them in here. I got just the reaction I hoped for. I take it "Yikes" means you don't like the last set? >> Word Ending Consonant Clusters: > > [snip] > >> [approximate]+[lateral] >> yl wl ywhl wwhl >> >> [fricative]+[lateral] >> fl vl sl zl cl jl xl hl >> fwhl vwhl swhl zwhl cwhl jwhl xwhl hwhl > >And these? I'm not looking forward to trying to pronounce any cluster >with /whl/, in any position. I thought of these while typing all this up. One could class /whl/ with the laterals, so I threw them in too. Honestly I think we've made Vulcan entirely _too_ pronounceable at this point. Remember that Vulcan is supposed to be hard for humans to pronounce. >> [aspirated stop]+[stop] >> khp khb kht khd khk khg khq >> th thb tht thd thk thg thq >> dh dhb dht dhd dhk dhg dhq > >These on the other hand, look better every time I see them. I mean, >written they still give off this initial sense of impossibility, but >spoken they sound very good, very Vulcan. We may want to impose a >same-voicing rule on them, as for the fricative+stops. And I think >they're probably permitted at the beginnings of words too. If we add them at the beginning of a word I think we should add a caveat that they cannot participate in a more complex consonant cluster. >> Now far as I can tell, we only need to do two things before we can >> start creating words the easy way. We need to know how to form >> syllables, and we need to finalize a frequency distribution for >> each of the following: >> >> 1. phonemes >> 2. consonant clusters >> 3. syllable forms > >and diphthongs, which we haven't touched. I did make a little mention of them, but I may have forgotten to post it to the list. The Lexicon says that Vulcan has many diphthongs, but not a great many appear in the Dictionary. Here are the ones which do: ie 3 0,12% ei 5 0,19% ia 1 0,04% oi 5 0,19% ae 2 0,08% ai 7 0,27% io 2 0,08% iaa 1 0,04% Those percentages refer to percent occurrence among the diphthongs only. The Lexicon does mention a few other diphthongs not in the dictionary: au, eu, ou. Some of the counts and diphthongs may change depending on how we divide up the syllables in a word. So some of our analysis of diphthongs may have to wait until we know or make up the rules for forming syllables. >> I'm going to suggest that we leave the frequencies for the phonemes >> pretty much as they are (except for increasing the values on the >> ones which do not appear in the dictionary to say 10%). > >I think in addition we should boost each of the "long" vowels, >especially aa. I think in a lot of cases the coiners of the terms in >our core vocabulary probably meant our /aa/ when they wrote . That could very well, be. I also think we should boost the frequency of the nasalized vowels (as long as we keep thinking of them as phonemes, that is). >Ha. First I was waiting for Marketa to come back. Then I took apart >my home computer to replace a part and had an interesting time >getting it to operate once I had it put back together. Once that was >taken care of, I got back to work on the web version of my morphemic >analyses, which is very nearly done. You can check it out at > > http://www,uit,net/liberty/vulcan I like. Very much. HTML has much greater richness and variety than just plain ASCII text. Rob Z.