> ...
> (I should start by mentioning that I use Kirshenbaum
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum_chart... on this
> list X-SAMPA seems
> to be more popular, but I don't know it; it's largely
> identical anyway. If
> you like, I can resend the whole thing as an HTML message in
> Unicode with
> true IPA.)

Unicode isn't a great idea because we don't know what other readers'
capabilities are. Plain ASCII is best in this type of environment.
X-SAMPA is preferred.


> I find SASXSEK quite impressive. It avoids practically all of
> the standard
> flaws of auxlang-making
> http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/! There
> are, however, a few things that made me curious.

I'm familiar with that site. I like what the author has too say but
consider him a bit too critical of Z. Given the time, place and
circumstances of its creation, I would have to say E-o turned out
fairly well.


> First is the choice of <x> for /@/. As a better choice <y> has been
> suggested. It is true that <y> runs the risk of being
> confused with [j], [i]
> and [y]... but confusing it with [I], [i"] or [I.] would
> actually put the
> speaker on the _right_ track, because such sounds are the
> closest many
> languages get to [@]. On the other hand, <x> runs the risk of
> being confused
> with not only [ks] but also [x]/[X], [S] and maybe even the
> Mandarin phoneme
> that is probably best explained as simultaneous [C] and [S;].
> It is true
> that SASXSEK already has a "weird" choice anyway, namely <q>,
> but that one
> stays a consonant, and it's possible to build a mental bridge
> "q -- k --
> g -- ng", so IMHO that's considerably less of a problem than <x>.

This has been explained in previous postings as well as on
alt.language.artificial.


> Secondly, I don't understand why, if there are already 6 vowels (most
> languages seem to have 5), why is one of them only used in one single
> morpheme (/@/ for making compound words)? This strikes me as rather
> wasteful, and it would lead lots of people to not
> distinguishing it from,
> say, /e/ or /a/. There are lots of logical places for /@/,
> such as Chinese
> words with /o-/ (like in the syllables that end in <-eng> in
> Pinyin), or the
> spaces we create in consonant clusters (which would become
> more recognizable
> to speakers of consonant-cluster languages if they contained /@/).

<x> is really only a buffer to separate consonants, not connector for
compounds. I wanted to mark the separation to avoid the tendency to
run them together whereas there is an optional schwa after final
consonants that can be used for those who are used to speaking in all
open syllables. Some compounds do not have <X> because the first
component already ends with a vowel.


> Then there are some phonemic distinctions which are globally rare.
> - Few languages have both /w/ and /v/. Many native speakers of German
> pronounce both of them as [w] in English because they find
> keeping the
> difference more difficult than pronouncing [w] alone already
> is for them! On
> the other hand, Mandarin, Cantonese and many more have only
> /w/ and lack
> /v/. Currently SASXSEK is designed to avoid ambiguity between
> /f/ and /v/;
> IMHO this potential confusion is _much_ less of a problem
> than the /w/-/v/
> distinction.
> Having [v] as an allophone of /w/ would make it a lot
> easier for a
> lot of people to pronounce /wi/ (a combination that, for
> example, doesn't
> occur in Mandarin or Japanese).

It looks like I'll have to publish an allophone list soon. There will
be some overlap among them, but contextually there shouldn't be any
problems.

Also, there are pairs of consonants which are used exclusivly of each
other. For example there is the word "SEK", but you will not see
"SEG", "ZEK", or "ZEG". Those pairs are P/B, T/D, K/G, F/V, S/Z and R/L.



> - I'm rather surprised by the occurrence of /z/. Globally,
> [z] is quite a
> rare sound, and as a phoneme it's rarer still -- rarer than,
> say, /?/. (For
> example, in northern and central Germany [z] the allophone of
> /s/ used in
> voiced surroundings, including the beginning of a word, while
> in the rest of
> the German-speaking world it doesn't exist at all. Even in
> English it's hard
> to find minimal pairs like <sane>/<zany>.) Why not change the
> few words that
> have it back to /s/?

There are major languages like Arabic, Russian, and even English that
do have /z/ so I wouldn't call it "rare". The addition of these
voiced consonants is recent and was mainly done to make the words more
recognizable. [s] is an allophone of /z/ anyway.


> On the other hand, I don't know whether exclusivity needs to
> be maintained
> between the voiced and unvoiced stops. Different languages
> use different
> features for distinguishing them, but few if any languages
> only have one
> series of stops. (Perhaps I should mention the southeastern kinds of
> German -- including Austrian Standard German -- as a case
> study: /b d g/ are
> not voiced, /p t k/ are not aspirated or ejective or
> anything, and still the
> difference is phonemic!)

> Which reminds me... we should try to document the approximate
> range of
> allowed realizations for each phoneme, for example to clear
> up whether a
> tap/flap should be /r/, /d/, /t/ or forbidden.

I had (may still have) such a list somewhere. I can publish it, but
time has been short lately and SASXSEK has been low priority compared
to other things I have going on.



> The emphatic particle <aj> is a great idea! Russian (/ZE/)
> and English
> (<fucking>) have such a thing, but most other languages
> sorely lack it. :-)

Russian is where the idea came from. ISTR finding others that have
similar particles.




> What is the difference between <ri> and <ru>? I can't figure it out.

RI (adj.)is used to introduce a proper noun.

ri misisipi
Mississippi

RU is used to connect a proper noun to its noun counterpart:

rivut ru misisipi
river by-the-name-of Mississippi
The Mississippi River