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

Hello!

On 9/8/05, Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> wrote:
> On Wed, 07 September 2005, 14:50 CEST, Julia Simon wrote:
>
>  > 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. ;)
>
> Oh, I don't mind. I saw BPJ's suggestion only after having
> written mine, by the way. I know they're using apostrophes
> in Russian transcription to indicate palatalization, so
> there's at least one feasible natlang usage.
I've even seen it in Russian pseudo-phonetic writing (i.e.
non-romanized, with <c'> representing [s_j] and so on). :-)

Hmm... Isn't there a romanization of Chinese (one of the well-known
ones that aren't Pinyin) that uses the apostrophe for aspiration?

> But then, I don't
> like apostrophes so very much. I modified my keyboard
> settings so that I can enter the middot with AltGr+F, so I
> haven't got so many difficulties entering "weird" letters
> like n-acute. Don't ask me why F.
I assume it was the only easily-reachable letter that hadn't been
assigned to anything else yet. ;-)

(Which reminds me, I need to do some keyboard remapping myself -- I've
been entering umlauts and the like as Alt-<number> ever since I
switched from QWERTY to Dvorak, and it's beginning to get on my
nerves. Now where did I put that Compose key...)

>  > 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)
>
> That's why I don't like Klingon romanization.
On the other hand, Klingon probably wasn't meant to look beautiful in
the first place. ;-)

>  > 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. ;-)
>
> Waldkater from the ZBB has a conlang called Ar<sigma>eía
> (pronounced somewhat like /Ar"Ceja/), where he mixes Latin
> and Greek letters. I tryed to mix alphabets myself once, but
> I don't think that mixing Latin letters with Greek or
> Cyrillic ones is that a good idea because in some fonts, the
> design principles (e.g. line heights, general letter shapes)
> are partly different for the different, but related
> alphabets.
*sigh* That's also a big problem if you want to cite, say, Russian
word forms in an English text (or vice versa). Fortunately there are
"international" font families by now, but that's only of use if you're
writing texts for printing -- you can't count on everyone who happens
onto your homepage to have the same Latin-Greek-Cyrillic-and-so-on
configuration that you used... Not to mention all those question marks
people will find in their E-mail if you send such a text by mail and
they have no Cyrillic font installed. ;-(

Incidentally, I know a man who had his typewriter modified so that he
could also type the schwa and (if I remember correctly) eng
characters. (He had this done a long time ago, of course, back in the
olden days when people still used typewriters.) Well, he specializes
in ancient Iranian languages, and the common romanization for some of
them does use schwa a lot... (That's the only context in which I've
ever seen an uppercase schwa, by the way. But I digress.)

I think there also is some ancient Middle Eastern language that has
some Greek characters in its romanization (graeco-romanization? ;) .
But of course I can't remember which one. :-(

>  > 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.
>  > :-}
>
> /me imagines a scene like in Hitchkock's "The Birds", mixed
> with today's omnipresent risk of terrorist attacks ...
>
> Öyhäälittohyy/Finland (IPA). Last Saturday, clueless
> passers-by of a house in downtown Ääkköyättilahtää were
> attacked by big swarms of random accents that came to life
> due to a failure in a computer algorithm. The little
> stingers caused an epedemy-like occurance of "nasal
> squiggles" [1] in peoples' speech in the affected region.
> Scientists are still curious how something like this could
> happen. Politicians as well as the local police notice that
> a terrorist attack by the radical Islamist linguists terror
> network, Al-Pakhtam-i-Allah-al-Muhammad, is not to be
> excluded ...
>
> ("IPA" stands for International Press Agency, d'oh. Any
> reseblance between real and fictional names is not intended
> and purely coincidental.)
Hilarious! I'll show your "press report" to my Finnish-learning
friends, if that's OK with you... :-)

[snip stuff about German music -- I can tell that I'll need to reserve
a little more time for record-shopping during my next trip to
Germany...]

> [1] Cross-Reference to the ZBB: In a topic some weeks ago,
> we joked about people like Edo Nyland et al who try to
> relate languages "mit dem Brecheisen" (no idea how to
> translate that into English).
Hmm... <clicketyclick> The LEO online dictionary
(http://dict.leo.org/?lang=de&lp=ende) doesn't have anything useful
under "Brecheisen", but for a phrase with a similar meaning ("auf
Teufel komm raus") I got the translation "by hook or by crook". Maybe
that's what you were looking for?

> Someone suggested that all
> languages with a "nasal squiggle" must be related, which led
> someone to say that he could imagine an old linguistics
> professor telling his students, "But don't forget to listen
> closely for the nasal squiggles!". It was more fun than this
> might sound like. Search the ZBB for "nasal squiggles" if
> you want to read the whole story. I don't know if it's still
> there, though, because it was in "Ephemera" I think. Threads
> in this subforum get deleted after a week usually.
I can imagine how funny it was, even without having been there. I
remember similar jokes from various linguistics classes. ;-)

> NB: Why can't Outlook Express get the linebreaks in quotations
> right? It's still a mystery to me.
No idea. Plain-vanilla Outlook (the one that's not "Express") has the
same problem, though. :-P

(I've manually fixed the line breaks in the text you quoted, by the
way, in case you're wondering what happened to them.)

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)