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

Hello!

On 9/7/05, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> Julia "Schnecki" Simon skrev:
>
> > Hmm... Since I'd be happiest with a one-grapheme-per-phoneme system,
> > I've decided to adopt the proposed consonant romanization with a few
> > changes:
> >
> > /p_h/ f         /p_>/ p         /b/  b          /w/  w
> > /t_h/ s         /t_>/ t         /d/  d          /r\/ r
> > /c_h/ h         /c_>/ c         /J\/ z          /j/  j
> > /k_h/ x         /k_>/ k         /g/  g          /M\/ q
> >
> > /L/ l, /N/ n
>
> Great!  How come I didn't think of using voiceless fricative
> letters for the aspirates?  Obviously I'm not as daring a
> romanizer as I like to think! ;)
Well, it took me long enough to come up with this idea too (even
though it seems *so* obvious now, doesn't it?). I feel I should have
thought of this much sooner; after all, in my three
"non-romanizations" I assigned exactly those letters to my aspirated
plosives that the corresponding natlangs use for fricatives in some
way or another. (The Greek letter phi is pronounced [p_h] in Classical
Greek and [f] in Modern Greek; the Georgian letter phar is pronounced
[p_h] but often corresponds to an original /f/ in foreign words; and
AFAIR the Devanagari letter base ph(a) can be transformed into f(a)
with just one tiny diacritic. The remaining Greek, Georgian, and
Devanagari voiceless-aspirate letters are used in similar ways.)

> For one thing I would have
> mapped |h| and |x| the other way around (in view of Pinyin
> and Portuguese*), but |h| for a palatal is great -- after all
> it *is* an upside-down Cyrillic |tS|! :)
I didn't even think of Pinyin and Portuguese (Portuguese being the one
Romance language where I'm totally lost ;) . The associations in my
head were <x> <-> [x] => this *has* to be a velar; and <h> -- well,
that's the only fricative-looking thing I had left, except for <v>,
which doesn't look like much of a palatal at all. ;-)

> *) Also in view of <http://ib.frath.net/w/Xrirampur_Romanization>
> of which I'm originally guilty.
Wow, interesting romanization... I still prefer the "normal" one,
though (i.e. the one used in most of the contemporary Indological
literature), because that's the one I originally learned, and also
because it seems to get along with fewer "exotic squiggle" characters.
(Yes, I do know that from a computing point of view, the thorn
character isn't all that much more difficult to handle than an
n-with-underdot or whatever. But the n-with-underdot romanization is
much easier for those of us who do most of our linguisting on paper.
At least if we don't also happen to (hand)write much Icelandic,
anyway...)

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)