Re: Phoneme system for my still-unnamed "Language X"

Hello!

On 9/5/05, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> Julia "Schnecki" Simon skrev:
>
> > There are the following consonant phonemes:
> >
> > voiceless aspirated plosives p_h, t_h, c_h, k_h
> > voiceless ejectives p_>, t_>, c_>, k_>
> > voiced unaspirated plosives b, d, J\, g
> > approximants/glides w, r\, j, M\
> >
> > Furthermore, there are two archiphonemes (nasal, /N/, and lateral,
> > /L/) that are realized as [m], [n], [J], [N] resp. [l_w], [l], [L],
> > [L\] depending on their surroundings.
> >
> > (No decision reached on consonant graphemes yet. Sorry.)
> >
>
> What about:
>
> /p_h/ p         /p_>/ p'        /b/  b          /w/  w
> /t_h/ t         /t_>/ t'        /d/  d          /r\/ r
> /c_h/ c         /c_>/ c'        /J\/ z          /j/  j
> /k_h/ k         /k_>/ k'        /g/  g          /M\/ h
>
> /L/ l, /N/ n
>
> ?
>
> Yes, I admit I enjoy constructing romanizations...
Good. The field of linguistics needs people like you. :-) (Seriously.
I'm not very good at romanizations myself. Or maybe I am, but in any
case, I don't enjoy constructing romanization systems... I seem to be
quite good at memorizing and using existing romanizations, though.)

Anyways.

For the plosives, the only feasible ways to go seem to be X : X' (your
suggestion) and Xh : X (Jeffrey's suggestion), at least for the time
being. (I choose to ignore the X : X-with-dot spelling I've seen e.g.
in Georgian textbooks, at least until someone gets me a Unicode
keyboard. Even a midpoint would be too clumsy to type. Sorry,
Carsten. ;)

I've been trying to come up with a system that would give me one
grapheme for each phoneme, but for that I'd either have to use
internalCaps (which I hate) to distinguish, say, <p> /p_h/ from
<P> /p_>/, or else I'd end up with some pretty weird mappings ("assign
all the obvious ones first and then use up the remaining characters
randomly", which could give me, for example, <x> for /c_>/ or <h> for
/M\/)...

So this was a little frustrating and I decided to amuse myself with
non-roman alphabets for a while. Now I still don't have a romanization
I'm happy with, but I do have a pretty good "hellenization" (using the
Greek letters pi : phi : beta for /p_>/ : /p_h/ : /b/),
"kartulization" (using the Georgian letters p'ar : phar : ban for
/p_>/ : /p_h/ : /b/), and "bharatization" (using the Devanagari
letter-bases p(a) : ph(a) : b(a) for /p_>/ : /p_h/ : /b/). Not really
useful except for private notes on paper (and not too useful even
there, since the only one of these three that I can write with
anything resembling speed is the Greek one). But at least I had some
fun, and I even managed to assign most of the letters in more or less
logical ways in all three cases. ;-)

(*sigh* I guess this is another one of those "If my old linguistics
professors could see me now" moments...)

Oh well. For the time being, I still have to resort to (icky, icky)
internalCaps and other weird stuff at least some of the time -- I'm
using a script for vocabulary generation, and I feel that if I started
assigning grapheme combinations to some of the phonemes, it'd get too
messy too soon, with random diacritics flying all over the place and
possibly causing serious injury to innocent bystanders. :-}

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)