User:Neuekatze/Guaspi: Difference between revisions

The sound '#' or 'uh' is common in English; all vowel letters are sometimes pronounced '#'.   The 'a' of <nowiki>''</nowiki>among" is a good example. This sound is called <nowiki>''</nowiki>schwa"; that German name is pronounced (with ''gua\spi'' letters)   <nowiki>''</nowiki>sqv#". '#' is not used in regular words; its purpose is to break up CC pairs that a particular speaker finds hard to pronounce, since virtually all speakers will be able to handle C#C.   It is to be ignored and it is only written in explanations like this one. Though normally considered a vowel, it is in the C class because it occurs among C's, and a word is defined as some C's followed by some V's.

The glottal stop ':' pronounced alone is a sudden (plosive) '#', but it is normally followed by a V so that it sounds like a brief pause after which the V comes on. In many English dialects, as in ''gua\spi'', it is found between a vowel-final and vowel-initial word, like <nowiki>''</nowiki>the:apple", while the Cockney dialect uses it much more extensively. The glottal stop is not used in regular words; its place is at the beginning of each sentence start word, and in vowel-initial foreign words.

English has thirteen subtly different vowels plus four official diphthongs but only five letters to represent them.   ''Gua\spi'' uses only six easily distinguished vowel sounds,   recruiting Y for one of them, and adds some vowel-like sounds which are considered consonants in English. Unfortunately, many regional accents of English turn simple vowels into diphthongs, invalidating the example words given in Table 2 [Pronuncation]. Other accents transform sounds beyond the bounds that a ''gua\spi'' speaker can recognize. If you speak with a regional accent, please use the vowel sounds that you can hear on television or radio (American or British will both work). Particularly troublesome examples, rendered with ''gua\spi'' letters, are shown in this table:

apanese speakers are famous for producing 'l' and 'r' that Europeans cannot distinguish. Chinese has distinct 'l' and 'r' but uses phoneme boundaries different from the European norm, so its speakers also have some trouble being understood. The ''gua\spi'' 'l' and 'r' are biased to European norms, and Asian speakers should take special care with these phonemes.

Preliminary   experience shows that the errors English-speaking beginners make most often are to interchange 'q'   with 'c', 'x' with 'j', and 'i' with 'y'; and to pronounce 'w' as 'oo' (should be 'ng').

Written blanks have no sound, and are optional.   In this document a blank usually comes before each word (except in the phrase <nowiki>''</nowiki>''gua\spi''"), although in running text it looks nicer to omit blanks before the tone '-'. There is no distinction between upper and lower case. The tones (described next) make punctuation unnecessary.   There are no periods at the ends of sentences; however, each sentence start word begins with a glottal stop, written as a colon.   This colon is a letter, not a punctuation.

The job of grammar is to stick words together into phrases. The grammar does not support meaning of any kind --- no tenses, no possessives, no nouns, no verbs. These ideas are handled at the organizational and semantic levels, using the grammar as a foundation. Like its morphology, the grammar of ''gua\spi'' is nearly minimal.

The grammar is stated in Backus-Naur form in Section [Backus]. For grammatical purposes there is only one kind of phrase (though distinctions are made at the organizational level), but words have five categories: the two words ''<nowiki>''</nowiki>fu"'' and ''<nowiki>''</nowiki>fi"'', sentence start words, other prefixes, and everything else. The main part of a phrase is a sequence of one or more words collectively called the <nowiki>''</nowiki>phrase predicate"; any prefixes in this must come first. After any of the prefixes or after the whole predicate the sub-phrases are interspersed. They, of course, have their own prefixes, predicates and sub-phrases.

Let us understand phrases with the help of the example in the following figure, showing the <nowiki>''</nowiki>parse tree" of a simple sentence. The root phrase is at the top; parse trees grow upside down. Sub-phrases with their own predicates come at the next lower level. These in turn may have their own sub-phrases. Each phrase is at a certain level and it attaches to the most recent phrase at the next higher level. The tones (see Table 4 [Tones]) show the level of each word relative to the one before it.