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

Isidora Zamora wrote:
> If I were to set up the orthography and then keep it the same after the
> sound changes, I would have to spell the Trehelo word for 'fox' as
> <siotune> (which is the proto-form, and quite possibly attested in writing
> somewhere) and pronounce it as [So?On].  That's a little too far out of
> synch for my sanity, so I spell it <shohon>.
You could always have a "sane" romanization and an "insane" native
orthography.  :-)  My Ivetsian will be something like that.

For that matter, there's a few distinctions marked in my romanization of
Uatakassi (such as [tsi]-[tSi] and [Ngi]-[Ni] - [Nk], [Ng], [Ni] and
possibly [Nj] are the *only* environments where [N] can occur,
incidentally) that aren't distinguished by the native orthography.

> What that means is that, in the modern language, the singular of the noun
> is /cet/ and the plural is /cet_w/.  The second gender in Trehelo is made
> up of nouns that form their plurals by labializing the final consonant,
> whatever that consonant happens to be.
Can *all* consonants be labialized?  What about labial consonants?  Can
[p_w] exist, or would it be simplified to [p], creating a group of nouns
whose plural is identical to the singular?

It might also be neat to have a dialect or related language that changed
those labialized consonants to something else, e.g., [t_w] -> [p], thus,
the plural of /cet/ would be /cep/  :-)

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