Re: Vocab #5

On 1 May 02, at 20:41, Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- In conlang@y..., Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@G...> wrote:
>
> > Crezhne culanuli cum cauan zië.
> > /"krEZnE kula"nuli kum ka"uan zi"jE/
>
> Heh, /"krEZnE/ just sounds so Obrenje.  ;-)
I'll take that as a compliment :)

> > dobrä chaa,
> > /do"bra: "tSaa/
>
> Is there a phonemic distinction between /a:/ and /aa/?  Does the
> pitch or stress drop during /"a.a/ but not in /a:/?
Yes, exactly. I found the email I had sent Mark about that and he
basically said what you said -- <ä> is /a:/, one long, nearly always
stressed, syllable, while <aa> is two syllables, of which one may be
stressed. In the example, it's /"a.a/ with the first 'a' stressed
(normal stress accent) and the second not. However, there's not glottal
stop or hiatus between the vowels.

There's also a word "pomäa", the accusative of "pomäe", a kind of
heroic epic form -- that would be /po"ma:.a/, I suppose ;)

(<ä> <ë> <ö> <ü> all, besides indicating a change in pronunciation,
mark that syllable as stressed unless there is a vowel with an explicit
accent mark elsewhere in the word, or another umlauted vowel earlier in
the word. But the change is not the same for each vowel: <ä> is /a:/
(long), <ë> is /jE/ (palatalised), <ö> is /2/ and <ü> is /y/
(rounding). Not that pretty or consistent a system, but once Mark had
devised it it was difficult to change -- and he later devised an
internal rationale why the same mark gave different results, based on
changing orthographic trends from Cadhinor to Verdurian, which also
explained why there are both capital and lower-case letters in the
script. Interesting ;)

Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>