This question makes me worry about how a native of łaá siri would render
(or, perhaps, just rend) English words. The phonological inventory of that
language is really limited comparatively to   /ɬ/, /tɬ/, /j/, /s/, /l/,
/ʔ/, /ɹ/,  /i/, /iː/, /y~u/, /yː~uː/, /ɑ/, /ɑː/, so I assume that a native
speaker would have issues. Consonant clusters would absolutely broken up
with epenthetic vowels. I don't think that English's other plosives would
be too difficult to grasp, so I imagine a łaá siri-ian could articulate
them. Onset-less syllables would probably have a glottal stop before
them...and maybe other sounds would have to be substituted? Luckily  łaá
siri has an approximation of English's  /ɹ/, so that might sound more
natural than natlang speakers who substitute a flap for that.

But I worry how a word like "sprinkle" would be pronounced...
[si.pʰi.ɹi.ʔə]? I don't even...



On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Melroch <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 2012/5/9 Allison Swenson <[log in to unmask]>:
> > Somewhat, yes. The speakers of this conlang are much longer-lived than
> > humans, so they typically would have little accent (as most adults
> would've
> > been speaking English for longer than the average human lifespan!), but
> my
> > conlang has a limited number of phonemes, so I'd imagine they'd have
> quite
> > a bit of difficulty pronouncing some of the ones that are farther from
> > Tirina, such as [ʧ]. They also tend to pronounce their t's and d's in a
> > "soft" way (tending toward "th"), so I imagine getting a hard "t" or "d"
> > out would be difficult.
>
> I guess that if they are more long-lived than humans *and didn't speak the
> human language very often* they would have a *double* accent: that of their
> native language *and* that of the human language as it sounded at the
> time they learnt it.  Madeline Palmer addressed that aspect of her dragons'
> accent when speaking human languages, which I thought was very nice!
>
> As some of you may remember I played around with adapting list members'
> names to Sohlob phonology and transcription. Ay vondar ef zæd vud
> ækæyoræytlæy
> riflext haw æ Sohlçan vud ispig Ingliç. Zæy vud probæblæy hæf an isiyer
> taym
> adæfting tu Ingliç fownowtæxtixs dæn tu ze fownæyms. Ay olsow vondar ef
> zæy riliy kud nad bræyg friy af vawal harmownæy. Zæd vud sertenliy mæyk
> zær æxsant læs feniy!
>
> I've actually been thinking about how a Yahab accent of Sohlob would sound.
> Could they cope with nasal and oral stops in the same word, and how?
>
> And a Rhodrese accent of English? Both like and unlike a French
> accent, probably.
>
> /bpj
>



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