Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 21 January 2014 20:20:50 R A Brown wrote:

> On 21/01/2014 15:47, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> 
> > On Tuesday 21 January 2014 13:20:25 R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> .... He does say that "Liva phonotactics... is
> >> intended to be based on the same principles of easiness
> >> both in pronouncing and perceiving", and refers to
> >> Rick Morneau's essay on the morphology of an
> >> artificial language.
> > 
> > Well, I see quite a few phonemes that most people on
> 
> > Earth will not find easy:
> Yes, but Claudio was not designing an auxlang where "most
> people on earth" perhaps ought to figure (tho often
> doesn't). He says quite explicitly that "Liva is constructed
> mainly for fun: at first, it has not any practical aim" and
> that the language is "an experiment, trying to satisfy both
> the requirements of logic and the aesthetic preferences of
> its author."  Therefore, what most people on earth find easy
> is not really relevant.

You are of course right.  As it is not an auxlang, such
considerations are utterly irrelevant.

> The language is a very personal language, so it is surely
> what Claudio finds easy that is relevant.

Yep.
 
> > the distinction between _l_ and _£_,
> 
> No problem   :)

Not to me, either.  While my native language German does not
distinguish them, I cope with them quite well.
 
> > the front rounded vowels, the dental fricatives,
> 
> I don't have a problem with the vowels - and, of course, I
> have not the slightest problems with dental fricatives; tho
> I suspect many of Claudio's fellow countrymen do    :;
> 
> > the velar fricatives. I feel that symmetry defeats easy
> > pronunciation here.

So far, no difficulties for me.  Neither with the vowels, nor
with the dental and velar fricatives.
 
> The only thing I really take issue with are his laterals.
> The velar lateral certainly exists, and there is an IPA
> symbol for, namely [ʟ].  But it is not exactly common, and I
> find trouble with it.

It is a very rare sound, and one that I haven't mastered yet.

>      But as for the so-called 'labial
> lateral, Claudio is quite right in saying that he "not aware
> of any language having one, neither of an IPA symbol to
> represent it.'  Not only does IPA not have symbol for, but
> the square where the symbol could appear is blocked out;
> i.e. it is considered a sound which is physically impossible
> to produce.

Yep.  There appears to be no such thing as a labial lateral.
 
> [snip]
> 
> >> I don't recall Claudio linking this to binary coding,
> >> tho of course such a system could be encoded in groups
> >> of five bits.  from what I recall, he liked the
> >> symmetry of the Turkish vowel system (as have many
> >> others, including myself) and built things up from
> >> there.  It's symmetry, I think, that Claudio likes,
> >> not whether it makes binary coding easy.
> > 
> > Yes.  Symmetry obviously was all the matter here; that
> > the dimensions of the grid (4x8) lend themselves well to
> > binary encoding may be coincidental.  He may have been
> > just as happy with a 3x6 grid, but perhaps felt that 12
> > consonants and six vowels wouldn't be enough.
> 
> Also IIRC he wanted those eight Turkish vowels    :)

Apparently.  The Turkish vowel cube is something I like, too.
One of my currently dormant projects, an Indo-European language
named Vylkosunyka, uses it, too.  Vylkosunyka is similar to
Turkish in some other ways as well: it is agglutinating and
uses vowel harmony.  It is spoken in the Sayan mountains in
the League of Lost Languages.

There is nothing wrong with symmetrical phoneme inventories;
most of my phoneme inventories are pretty symmetrical, too.
But Gnoli forces things quite a bit to fit his inventory into
that 8x4 grid.  There are many symmetrical shapes that aren't
rectangles ;)
 
> [snip]
> 
> >> I'm not sure that Kinya now has a web presence.  In any
> >> case, it is not a loglang and is not relevant to this
> >> thread.
> > 
> > OK.
> 
> Which is a pity IMO.  It was invented by Maurizio Gavioli.
> I notice its phoneme inventory also includes [θ] and [ð] -
> hey, those Italians sure those dental fricatives, tho in
> Kinya they're alveolar, not dental.  ;)
> 
> 
> it also has the eight Turkish vowels, but the language also
> has vowel harmony.  There are also rules of assimilation and
> internal sandhi.
> 
> The language makes no morphological distinction between
> verb, noun and adjective (I like it!).  The majority of
> stems are either tr-consonantal or bi-consonantal.  There's
> also a whole lot of flexional apparatus, which I won't
> attempt to describe here.
>  
> what I particularly liked was the stuff about prosody in
> verse - far too little, but more than most conlangers ever
> give.  As for the valam~lah polarity, I won't even attempt
> to explain here.
> 
> IMO the language really deserves to be online!

Apparently.  What you say about it sounds interesting enough.

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