User:Selguha/Sandbox
A mild critique of Latejami
Latejami is one of the most fully developed constructed languages in existence -- as far as grammar goes, at least. It appears on the whole to be a remarkable success at its goals. Although I'm unqualified to assess most of Morneau's work in Lexical Semantics, I can speak to his phonological and morphological choices. I question a few of these. The basics are sound, but certain things could have been done in more mnemonic and naturalistic ways.
Morneau's inventory and orthography are both very sensible. He uses a standard five-vowel system and the following set of consonants:
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | unvoiced | p | t | c t͡ʃ | k | |
| voiced | b | d | j d͡ʒ | g | ||
| Fricative | unvoiced | f | s | x ʃ | h | |
| voiced | v | z | q ʒ | |||
| Nasal | m | n | ||||
| Lateral | l | |||||
| Rhotic | r | |||||
| Semivowel | w | y j | ||||
Phonetic diphthongs are treated as vowel-semivowel sequences. Phonotactics are very strict, permitting no more than one consonant plus an optional semivowel in onset position and, where coda is present, only nasals (N) and optionally semivowels (S) in coda position. Maximal syllable structure is thus CV(S)N. This is fine. I'd perhaps be laxer on onsets and tighter on codas; diphthongs are fine, but codas such as that of loyn are ugly to me. As for the other phonotactical rules, they are sound, . As far as orthography goes -- and this is a really minor point of preference -- I wouldn't represent semivowels with consonant letters in coda. The common practice is to use vowel letters: this is the convention in almost every natural language written in the Latin alphabet outside of Eastern Europe. Also, I think q is better for glottal stop than for /ʒ/ (assuming word-initial glottal stops, if present, are either not phonemic or not written, as is the norm). The phoneme /ʒ/ is one of the most unnecessary of the standard Lojban-Loglan-Latejami set, in my estimation. In what major languages is it fully contrastive with /d͡ʒ/ or /zj/, not just contrastive in loanwords and/or restricted in occurrence? French, English (though the contrast has a low functional load) and uh, Polish? Turkish? Only the /v/-/w/ contrast appears to be rarer among major languages. Latejami has both /d͡ʒ/ and /zj/ (in at least one relatively common morpheme, zyu).
But so far, so good; these are just quibbles. Latejami's biggest problem is that it doesn't logically map consonants to morphological classes.