Re: Final (?) Senyecan Orthography

Charlie wrote on Tue 16 August 2005, 19:19 MET:

 > I borrowed the idea of double acute from Hungarian,
 > something I couldn't do on WordPerfect.  Hungarian has
 > only the "o" and the "u," but I can use Word's combining
 > diacritical marks for the other four vowels.

Which version of Word have you got? I've got 2000 and with
this version, the double acute is not a combining letter.
Though you can do nice things with Unicode now that the list
finally seems to support it:

a̋ e̋ ı̋ ő ű

 > 9. h /j_0/ - a voiceless palatal approximant.  In Word I
 > use "h" with a crossbar because just plan "h" might be
 > confusing.

Ħ, ħ

 > 13. £ /l_d_0/ - I use l-stroke in Word which I borrowed
 > from the Polish alphabet where it represents the
 > labial-velar approximant.

Ł, ł

 > 15. µ /m_0/ - In Word I use the Old English wynn, which
 > looks like a lower case "p" with its nose in the air!

ƿ

 > 23. ç /ts)/ - Wanting to avoid the use of acute accents
 > over consonants, I have chosen to use, in Word, the s
 > with the retroflex hook.

ʂ

 > 30. ß /dz)/ - As with the unvoiced variant, I have chosen
 > to use, in Word, the z with the retroflex hook.

ʐ

BTW, Old High German uses something similar to z̨ (z-ogonek)
for /s/ (modern <ss> and <ß>) IIRC.

 > ë /E/ - In Word I use the Ukrainian IE, a backwards
 > yeh-ree open in the "correct" position.  I find it more
 > pleasing than epsilon. In Wiki.frath and here I use "ë."

Є, є

 > ï /I/ - In word I use the dotless "i."

Oooh, that evil "İ, ı"

 > dotless "j."  I can't find it in Word.  Has anyone else
 > seen this grapheme?

It's not in the standard Unicode as it seems, at least Arial
Unicode MS doesn't have it, and AFAIK it's the most complete
Unicode font you can get. Gentium has it at U+E900.

 > inverted breve under the consonant.

An inverted breve? That's only possible with Unicode's
combining diacritics I guess.

 > So many wonderful graphemes to choose from on Word, but I
 > didn't want to get too carried away!

Indeed, Latin-1 and all the extensions include quite a lot
possibilities. I haven't yet found a/e/i/o/u-macron-underdot
yet which I originally needed for Ayeri. But don't overdo it
with the diacritics, a text can easily become illegible
then. Also, at least IMNSHO, an overdose of diacritics is
unaesthetic.

Carsten

NB: Outlook Express is a bitch when it comes to linebreaks
    in quotes! I always have to adjust things myself :(
    OE frequently puts only one word in one line under
    certain conditions, for some reason.

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