On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 22:53 -0400, Herman Miller wrote:

> Still, it's hard to avoid English influence entirely, and I've overused
> /T/ and /D/ in many of my older conlangs. Another English influence in
> my older langs is having separate /I/ and /i/ phonemes. I wonder if
> similarly there are phonemes that are underused in conlangs due to being
> unfamiliar to or difficult for English speakers. Uvular, pharyngeal,
> epiglottal sounds? Implosives?

I suppose we all have things we're not good at or just can't do (tones
and implosives, in my case), which would be rather pointless to use.

My Liburnes started as a project for a maximal phonemic system for a
Romance language, hence /č ǰ š ž ɨ/. Paladhesi, a North Semitic
language, has /θ δ/ (not unreasonable in that family) and /ɬ/, but the
"emphatics" and "laryngeals" are eliminated just to make it different.
Tengol (currently on the back-burner) has retracted-tongue-root vowel
harmony, /ƛ/ and ejectives, because they're interesting, but I've
resisted the temptation to have /θ δ/. I keep meaning to do a *big*
system, with contrasts like /t tʰ t’ d/ and /ḱ k q/, and perhaps even
a /tθ/ affricate.