| That clarifies a bit, but still leaves me confused at some of the choices made. Why include both sounds "r" and "l", when they can be tricky to distinguish for some speakers, and then use Japanese as pronunciation guide? The sounds "m/n" are also easy to mix up. Same with "b/v", which are pretty much interchangeable to a lot of Spanish speakers. I think the number of consonants could have been reduced considerably. I like how the language flows though. It seems like a goal has been to avoid consonant clusters. It feels kind of like Swahili, though I don't speak that at all. The only input I would have on this point is that the verb/noun/adjective markers "i/a/e" would be hard to distinguish against words ending in a vowel, which seems to happen a lot. In rapid speech I see that becoming a problem that would cause it to flow less well, or breed forth a need for a de facto fixed word order for clarity. What if every word started with a consonant and ended in a vowel, including those three markers? What if we completely got rid of problem pairs like "rl/mn/bv", by removing one or both in each pair? Could we get by using mainly voiced consonants? I kind of want to fork this project and try it out. To be clear, while I am being critical in this comment, I want to explicitly say also that it is an impressive job to have made a new language, and refine it to this level of minimalism. Perhaps I am wary after having "wasted" a lot of time on Esperanto. |