Re: Graeca sine flexione

On 5/4/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>
> Philip Newton writes:
> >...
> > Though the sound in "vjo" and "jo" is the same, [j\], I'm not sure
> > whether I'd like to use soft sign for the second case, since it's more
> > of a consonant post-modifier to me than a stand-alone consonant.
>
> Ok, yes, it definitely is a postmodifier in Russian.  In Bulgarian,
> however, the hard sign is a regular vowel (but not the soft sign).
> According to my dictionary, there are even some words beginning with a
> hard sign.
Do you have any suggestions for a Latin equivalent, for
forced-palatalisation contexts there? I'd like to keep the isomorphism
between the two orthographies, as much as possible.

Ideally, I'd need a character that is (a) Latin (the current
orthography no longer has any non-Latin letters in it), (b) cased, (c)
in common fonts, and (d) similar in shape to whatever I use for
regularly-palatalised letters (currently comma/cedilla below).

I suppose I could continue using |j|, but then Latin would be
conflating two symbols that Greek separates (and I still think the
separation is a good idea). Other things that've come to mind are:

- U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE (not so good font support, no case)
- U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (aka apostrophe; not a letter)
- U+0184/5 LATIN LETTER TONE SIX (essentially a Latin mjagkij znak,
imported for use as a tone mark for Zhuang romanisation; not so good
font support, though)
- U+012C/D LATIN LETTER I WITH BREVE (matches the etymological origin
of the sound)
- U+0134/5 LATIN LETTER J WITH CIRCUMFLEX (as a modified |j|)
- U+00B8 CEDILLA (spacing mark; not a letter, though, and not cased)
- U+002C COMMA

Any suggestions/recommendations?

i-breve just came to mind just now, while writing this and looking
through Unicode code charts, but maybe that one's the best. It doesn't
match criterion (d), but that's the weakest of the four anyway.

Or maybe I should just go with using the Cyrillic sign anyway, even in Latin.

Or using |j| for forced palatalisation and a different character for
stand-alone [j\], e.g. j-circumflex.

(Incidentally, I'm toying with the idea of discarding Latin j from the
Greek orthography and using Cyrillic ј instead. Ideally, I'd even
substitute c-cedilla with something else non-Latin, but I'm not sure
what to use. Possibly chuck the cedilla entirely and then use Latin
|c| in Latin and Cyrillic |с| in Greek. Hmm, decisions, decisions.)

> In S11, I used the soft sign for /j/ (and to get a symmetry the hard
> sign for /w/)
I like that!

> because I wanted to get rid of all diacritics, including
> dot above.  Strange motivation
I can understand it, though!

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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