Re: Digraphic letters (was: Dutch "ij")

Fakatinal namafiul (bnathyuw):
> so turkish _could_, theoretically be written with an
> alphabet that only explicitly marks the first vowel of
> a word, and then only distiguished which harmony group
> each subsequent vowel is a member of ( {e,a} or
> [i,I,u,U:}, o and o: not harmonising ).
Well, one conlang I know of that uses vowel harmony, its native script
doesn't distinguish between front and back vowels at all.  The pairs in
that conlang are /i/-/u/ /e/-/o/, and /A/-/&/ (an earlier stage merged
front-rounded and front-unrounded as well as back-rounded and
back-unrounded).  There is a mark that can be added to the front of a
word to say "this is a front-vowel word" or "this is a back-vowel word",
but its mostly only used in dictionaries and, presumably, children's
literature.  The reader just has to use his or her knowledge of the
language to know whether a given word is, say, /kutos/ or /kites/.

Foreign words (some of which violate the vowel harmony rules) are
written in a borrowed script, analogous to the katakana-hiragana
distinction in Japanese.

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