Re: Plausibility Check


DJensen wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
DJensen wrote:
Is anyone willing to give me some feedback on the below points, or has
my flaunting of linguistic history (in speculating on events,
societies, organizations, etc in a hypothetical future) soured too many
people?

You might start by looking up the difference between "flaunt" and
"flout."

Oh, burn! I had initially typed "flaunting my ignorance of", but
whatever: You win! Good for you!

Which sounds are most likely to collapse into others, near enough that
they might be represented by the same glyph?

Look at the history of any language. Apparently you want to know which
phonemes are most likely to merge. There's no "near enough"; either a
distinction is phonemic, or it isn't.

And here I thought by asking people who might already be familiar with
the history of any given language, or aware of evolutionary trends in
languages, I could get a variety of opinions based on recorded
collapses in existing languages. I should have known better. I guess
I'll drop everything and go back to school for linguistics.

The verb is "merge," and the noun is "merger."

Sound change is not predictable. Period.

That said, more marked sounds are less stable than less marked ones,
but you'll probably get to second-year linguistics before you can deal
with markedness theory. (That is, it won't be covered in Ling 101, but
it's basic to Phonology 201.)

Particularly vowels. I
have my own guesses, but they're only guesses. I plan on having some
featural elements in the letters, for certain sounds that are likely to
remain distinct enough to warrant it. I have no qualms about a 30+ or
40+ character alphabet, the more the better.

How do you make a script partially featural?

This really shouldn't need an explanation. There's a script. Some of
the symbols contain elements indicative of the mechanics of
pronunciation. Some do not. Thus, the script is partially featural.

And how did this mish-mash come about? The only featural scripts (where
did you get that term?) are carefully designed, by people with a firm
grasp of phonological features, and no one would invent a "partially
featural" script.

You need no more letters than you have phonemes.

Which takes us back to which of the listed phonemes might realistically
be expected to collapse, therefore changing which phonemes will need
representation.

Now you know why no one answered your questions initially.

Because I didn't know the answers myself, and outed myself as a
non-linguist, it would seem.

Because you don't know which questions to ask. You ask unanswerable
questions. Language ain't physics.

.

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