Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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/.

Reply

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>