Re: lexicon; comments Saul Epstein Sat, 14 Mar 1998 11:35:39 -0600 Quotes from: Sorik of Vulcan Date: Friday, March 13, 1998 7:06 PM >Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 16:47:37 -0600 >From: Rob Zook > >>At 12:37 PM 3/12/98 -0600, Saul Epstein wrote: >> >>>This has yet to be resolved, exactly. We're pretty sure that >>>[a:] is as in German "Bach," and StandAmEng "stop." But [a] >>>is a bit of a mystery... >> >>Funny I thought that we felt pretty sure about [a], not [a:] >>since an example pronunciation for [a:] does not even appear >>in the Lexicon Um, Rob's right. Without an example, I unconsciously interpolated a pronunciation for it, and then had nothing to contradict the interpolation. Very clever of me. The mystery about [a] is just personal: I don't know how to pronounce Fr. "patte'" [This is Sorik, now...] >I don't see any logic in using one >alphabetical character to represent two or more Vulcan sounds. >You may have made different Vulcan characters to use, but >using a notation where can sound differently in separate >instances is not logical. Is it? Actually, it is quite logical in two, somewhat related ways. The first has to do with phonology, the way the speakers of a language organize its sounds in their minds. Sounds in actual speech are rarely pronounced with any degree of "purity," but there are patterns to the distortion that are used by an audience to recognize the "ideal" sound intended by the speaker. The "ideal" sounds of a language are its phonemes. The different forms a phoneme may take in actual speech are that phoneme's allophones. However, I think the logic you question is the second: the logic of the available character set. The Zvelebils wrote for the vowel in "bit" and for the vowel in "beat" primarily because the alphabetic characters in the upper 128 which are most widely available for use with internet mail include only 5 vowel signs, and the ZC gives Vulcan 12 vowel phonemes. So their transcription, like many orthographies based on the same 26-character set bequeathed us by the Romans, makes use of diacritical marks. Even if we dipped down into the lower 128, we would only gain 2 vowel signs; commandeering and would still only bring our total to 9, which is 3 short... >So I think we should use a more Japanese "romaji" notation to >illustrate sounds. If you can map Romaji notation signs to the phonemes in the ZC, I'd be interested to see it. Both the original and my modified transcriptions make use of awkward compromises with ASCII, and I'd be very happy to adopt any improvements you can offer. -- from Saul Epstein locus*planetkc,com http://www,jccc,net/~sepstein "Surak ow'phaaper thes'hi thes'tca'; thes'phaadjar thes'hi suraketca'." -- K'dvarin Urswhl'at