Re: Ulm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan van Steenbergen" <ijzeren_jan@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 9:08 AM
Subject: Re: Ulm


> Interesting to use the Umlaut that
> way. I have only seen |ö| pronounced like Danish |ø| (German, Swedish,
> Turkish), or like schwa (Komi).
If it's of any interest, I often use it to indicate a long vowel.
Originally, this convention arose from a language I was working on.  The
speakers of that language needed a way to mark irregularly stressed vowels.
Already having an alphabet, I decided that a dot over a letter (or under a
letter with an ascender) was the way to mark it.  But some of the
combinations of letter-letter two indicate long sounds didn't look that
great, so I decided that two dots marked length, and that the two diacritics
combined (three dots, then) marked a long, irregularly stressed vowel.

But then I realized that they could all be represented easily in Roman
script, using an acute accent for one dot, an umlaut for two (except over
the consonants, these I write doubly in Roman script), and a circumflex to
represent the little triangle of three dots.

Does anyone else use a system like this for romanization?

Joe Fatula


P.S.  I also use umlauts in a few languages to indicate the front rounding
of German.  In another language, I have acute accents marking length, as in
Icelandic, and in yet another, they mark lax complements of the seven
cardinal vowels.