Re: Semetic-style Syllabry (was Re: I'm back!)

Hi,

Nik Taylor wrote on Wed 17 Aug 2005, 04:17 MET

 > 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/.

That strongly reminds me of Indic style abugidas: All
consonants have an <a> tacked on them and you need a vowel
killer (virama) to delete the <a>. All vowels (and also
sometimes /r=/ and /l=/ IIRC) are indicated by
diacritics that are usually written over the consonantal
base but there are also some scripts that have vowel
diacritics before, behind and under or somehow around the
consonant. Note that -e may occur *before* a consonant as
well in many such scripts. Look at omniglot.com under
"syllabic alphabets" (IIRC). Historically, this kind of
system derives from semitic writing systems.

Would "Uatakassi" be written as _HuH-T-K-SSi_?

Carsten

<shameless plug>
My Tahano Nuhicamu writing works similar to yours:
www.beckerscarsten.de/conlang/ayeri/ayeri.tahanonuhicamu.html
<http://www.beckerscarsten.de/conlang/ayeri/ayeri.tahanonuhicamu.html>
</shameless plug>

--
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)

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