Re: Graeca sine flexione

On Thu, 03 May 2007 18:26:35 -0400, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

> OTOH, some other characters let you have more choice: you could have
> three distinct Ls, since the corresponding characters look different
> in all three alphabets.
Yes. I have vaccilated over doing something similar with the Cyrillic form
of Terzemian: having Рр for /4/ and Rʀ for /r\/.

Right now, all the orthographies other than Modern Latin are lagging way
behind my ongoing developments to the phonology. See
http://wiki.frath.net/Terzemian for the current phonology (now with added
Caucasus!) and the Modern Latin orthography, in comparison with the
nathistorically old Cyrillic, UTA and Arabic script forms.

> (I need to make a conlang that has /S/ in order to use Cyrillic 'sha'.)
>> I mixed Greek, Coptic and Hebrew characters in Western-branch
>> Thagojian v3
>
> Ah, interesting.  How did Coptic fit in visually?  Do you have
> samples?
I "cheated" by using the Coptic characters bundled with the Greek block in
Unicode, which are typographically pretty close to the remainder of that
block in most (all?) fonts I've seen. I had to bear a certain amount of
font-size wrangling with the Hebrew characters, especially to provide
distinct upper and lower case forms.

It was essentially the Greek alphabet with s (descended from ϝ) for /u/, ζ
for /ts/, צ for /K/ ע for /N/, י for /@/, ϩ  for /h/, ϧ for /?/ and ϣ for
/S/.

The alphabet was (I may be misremembering a bit):
α β γ δ ε s ζ η θ ι י κ λ צ μ ν ע ξ ο π ρ ϲ ϣ τ υ φ χ ψ ω ϩ ϧ
/A b g d e u ts E T i @ k l K m n N ks o p r\ s t i\ f x ps O h ?/

The letters s, ι, and υ also stood for /w/, /j/ and /M\/ when marked with
"a diacritic". The rule was that just about any clear and consistent mark
(being the only diacritic in the language) could be used depending on the
individual scribe, but in my notes I mostly used a breve.

>> a whole mixed bag
>> for Terzemian (Eastern-branch Thagojian v3) -- one Latin script using
>> relatively pure Latin-1 (plus l-slash and a few dots 'n' squiggles),
>
> I love 'x diaeresis' (although I never used it).  I *love* diaereses,
> anyway.  Is it because I'm German?  But I love acutes, too.  Is it
> because I live so close to France (only 6km)?? :-P
I do not diaeresize in Terzemian (aside from vowels), as you will see at
the link above. The Modern Latin form uses hacek (general-purpose
flanger), dot-above/below (mostly for backing, but also a bit
general-purpose), curved-apostrophe (glottalization), and ring
(labialization).

You may be pleased to note that I did once have a stub of a lang with ẅ
for /H/, though.



Paul



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