Re: Messy orthography (Re: Sound change rules for erosion)

At 04:20 21.11.2003, Nik Taylor wrote:

>You could always have a "sane" romanization and an "insane" native
>orthography.  :-)  My Ivetsian will be something like that.
So will/does my Sohlob.  Mind you I don't know
what the native graphemes look like, but I do
know that some of them are distinguished by
diacritics and/or digraphs that are unsyste-
matic but somewhat based on the historical
phonology/orthography of the lang.  Thus e.g.
/s/ is distinguished from /h/ by a diacritic
-- or by doubling the {h} grapheme --, since *s
in most contexts became /h/. Most cases of "modern"
/s/ are derived from *t_j, but are written in the
same way as the occasional preserved *s. With
/p t k/ it gets real messy, since they are written
as {bb dd gg} or as {bh dh gh} without any rule,
in spite of the fact that there is a syncronic
rule which turns /b d g/ + /h/ into /p t k/,
whereas the doubling convention is entirely arbitrary.
(There is also the possibility of using a diacritic on
{b d g}, but that was invented by and is almost
exclusively used by, grammarians and philologists who
feel the need for a more accurate orthography.)

The Romanization OTOH has unique symbols for most
phonemes, the main exception being {ny} for /J/ and
{ng} for /N/, which reflect the usage of the native
orthography.  The only case of a diacritic in the
romanization is {ç} (c-cedilla) for /s\/ vs. {c} for
/ts\/, but these two graphemes are not similarly related
in the native script.

There is also an ASCIIfication of the romanization
which uses {tj sj dj zj} instead of {c ç j} (where
{zj} indicates the allophonic replacement of /dz\/
by /z\/ before /d/, since I think {djd} looks ugly.)

BTW the extrafictional explanation for the {ny}
digraph for /J/ is that I got confused by {nj}
in the ASCIIfication -- cf. {nj} for /ndz\/ in
the romanization!  Also I got confused by {ñ}
(n-tilde) in the romanization, since I had
gotten used to {ñ} for [N] in another conlang.




/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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