Semetic-style Syllabry (was Re: I'm back!)
From: | Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, August 17, 2005, 2:14 |
Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Nik Taylor writes:
>
>>Hi everyone! I don't know how many of you will remember me, but I
>>used to be an active member. I'm back now
>
>
> Hi Nik! Welcome back! :-)
>
> It's been a while. Did you mainly work on conlangs? Or on
> RealLife(tm)? :-)
>
> **Henrik
Mostly RealLife(tm). I did come up with an idea for the Uatakassi
script, however. It's a sort of Semetic-style syllabry. The basic
characters represent the consonants of a syllable. For example, you'd
have TN or KL or P-L and so on (my convention is to write consonants in
capitals, vowel diacritics in lower case, the dash disambiguates
between, e.g., PL (pli, pla, plu) and P-L (pil, pal, pul). Then you add
diacritics indicating the vowels, with a default /a/, thus, TN = tan,
KLi = kli, P-Lu = pul, and so forth. A "vowel killer" also exists to
combine characters to form syllables that don't have characters. There
are a number of these, due to sound changes that produced syllables
which didn't exist in teh ancestral language. For example, there were
no syllables ending in voiced fricatives in the ancestral language, but
there is in the classical language. Thus, a word like "kazdan" would be
written K Z. D-N (that is, K by itself, Z with vowel killer, and D-N by
itself. A set of characters also exist to indicate syllables without an
onset (historically derived from syllables beginning with /h/, thus my
convention is to use H). Glides are indicated with combinations. For
example, /kwi/ is written Ku Hi. Y and W actually do have characters,
but they're only used for syllables beginning with /j/ and /w/.
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