Re: Zvelebil/Epstein/McReynold Comparison Rob Zook Mon, 13 Jul 1998 08:25:14 -0500 At 09:08 PM 7/10/98 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote: >Quotes from: Rob Zook >Date: Friday, July 10, 1998 5:42 PM > >> At 04:49 PM 7/10/98 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote: >> >> > Incidentally, to further confuse matters, I can see >> > a lot of possibility in the direction of some of >> > Ryan's suggestions. Especially, if we use and >> > for the sounds in "church" and "judge" >> > respectively, that eliminates one of the two- >> > character signs () and one of the three- >> > character signs (). >> >> Well, the only thing I don't like about that is it >> seems less elegant than having the symbols for that >> set of sounds structurally similar to the IPA >> versions. With for and for , and >> for and for . > >I think you mean that doing it that way better represents the >phonetic relationships of the sounds -- and you're right. That's >exactly why I proposed it. At the same time, I have this theory that >the "church" and "judge" sounds were blade-stops at an earlier stage >of the language, and IPA uses a modified and for precisely >those sounds. Mostly, though, I don't think we should lean too >heavily on other alphabets, like IPA. They all attempt to do the same >thing we're doing, just with different sounds. > >(BTW, if we go this route with and , I'd be rather tempted to >suggest that we use to represent original -- which would >seem intuitive to, for instance, French speakers -- and for >original . Both on the logic of for /x/.) At this point I think we must go with a combination of the transcription methods proposed so far. I think that overcoming our reluctance to use the and would help make the language more easily learned by English speakers. I'm not sure what other languages use those symbols for similar sounds in their languages but they would also benefit. The and and and just look very wierd for the souns they represent, to your average English speaker. >> >Also, if we follow the logic of for /x/, we could use >for /f/, >> >freeing to represent the voiceless W (currently at ) and >thereby >> >eliminating the other three-character sign () by replacing it >> >with ... >> >> Now, this idea, I do like. > >That's reassuring. It seems a natural thing to me, but I seem to have >a strange perspective on these things. But, as nicely as it fits in with the rest, I know having the represent something other than will confuse the hell out of people trying to learn Vulcan. >> I think we got two votes for the vowel+h diagraphs (hint, hint :). > >:-p I would be more concerned about that if I thought we actually >needed more than six vowel signs. Well, just going by the words in the dictionary we have Shikahr, Venlinahr, Sehlat, all of which use that vowel+h format. When Marketa, pronounced these words over the phone the + sounded much different than that without the . One of the reasons I'd like keep that as a formal transcription rule. It would make the transcription a little more phonetic than only six vowel sounds would allow. >And, now that I think about it, if >we use for /v/, and for /w/ (on the same pattern as for >/f/ and for original , that frees up for /u/ and for >/^/. Yes, it's a nice pattern, but I think it would really confuse beginning speakers. Rob Z. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ And isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony, anyway? I mean, all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, ooh ooh ooh, the sky's the limit! -- The Tick