Re: A Few Suggestions (was Re: Privacy and Translating SevTrek 2) Saul Epstein Sat, 20 Jun 1998 15:53:05 -0500 Quotes from: Rob Zook Date: Saturday, June 20, 1998 10:07 AM > >At 09:15 AM 6/20/98 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote: > >>Instead, how about this: remove the isolated H sound from Vulcan >>altogether. Turn all of the few occurances into /x/. Then we can use >>vowel + h to distinguish "long" from "short" vowels (though I >>anticipate trouble there...) and consonant + h to indicate aspiration >>or friction. > >Sounds good to me. What kind of trouble to you think we'll run into >with vowel+h constructions? Only that the "typical" interpretations of vowel + h are inconsistent. So we could apply the +h consistently, and be no less confusing than we are now, or apply it inconsistently and probably run out of distinct representations. The latter would look like: VOWELS: ih * i u eh o e oh short a ah long * It may not matter that we have no way to represet a "short U," because it didn't seem to occur in any of the words Marketa pronounced. (The problem, of course, is that typically invokes a schwa sound, rather than the sound in "put.") Of course, my suspicion is that the "short" and "long" vowels are allophones of a smaller set of phonemes, with the possible exception of a~ah. So that we really only have five or six vowels. In which case we'd only be spelling them two different ways to aid people unfamiliar with Vulcan phonology. On the other hand, if Vulcan has, for instance, two unrelated words, one of which sounds like "bead" and the other of which sounds like "bid," then we actually need different ways to represent the two vowels. And if that turns out to be the case, we could even abandon the long vs. short labels, and just say, "These are Vulcan's nine vowels." Or however many. -- from Saul Epstein locus*planetkc,com www,jccc,net/~sepstein "Surahk ohw'phahpehr thes'xi thehs'chah'; thehs'phahdzhahr thehs'xi surahkehchah'." -- K'dvahrihn Urswhl'aht