Re: Terzemian on the web

Paul Bennett skrev:
 > Well, kind of.
 >
 > The official Terzemian reference grammar is online at
 > http://wiki.frath.net/Terzemian
 >
 > Right now, there's not much to see, but that will be the
 > official home for as long as there's a wiki.frath.net
 >
 > I shall be transferring my notes over on a sporadic basis,
 > and adding new information as it occurs to me.

It looks fine. I just wonder about two or three things:

Is the sound change section complete? It doesn't give that
impression.

*gh > G_h\ doesn't seen realistic to me. I'd sooner expect
*g_h > h\ -- cf. the fate of *gjh in Sanskrit, although that
supposedly went through *z\_h\. Did you know BTW that *dhgjh
is the only cromulent source of jh in Sanskrit?

The Cyrillic omega Ѡѡ for /Q/ å doesn't seem realistic to
me. The Soviet orthographies for various languages avoided
all archaic Cyrillic letters no longer used in Russian
like the plague, no doubt because they had come to be
associated with Church Slavic. If they used shapes
similar to such letters it was always with different
values; witness the Cyrillic ö Ө, ө alongside that
strange Ҫ used for Bashkir /T/, or the so-called semi-
soft sign Ҍҍ from I don't know which language which to
all the world looks like jat'! An apparent exception
like Ukrainian Іі are in fact pre- Soviet: Ukrainian
orthography was devised by 19th century Austro-Hungarian
scholars at a time when that language was regarded as a
Russian patois by the Tsar regime.(*)

So what might a Soviet orthography use for /Q/? I'm not
aware of any Soviet language which has a distinction between
two o-type sounds. Since many Soviet orthographies used
'schwa' Әә for /&/ maybe you can use that for the front
/a/ and a Аа for the back /Q/? In Abkhaz schwa represents
labialization of the preceding consonant, so it may work for
/Q/ too. N.B. that Turkic a is /A/, and moreover the letters
а and о are closely related to Russian orthographic
sensibilities. Another possibility is the hard sign Ъъ for
å, since that letter was actually made useful in some
Soviet orthographies. It is also used for the [@] allophone
of /a/ in Cyrillo-phonetic notation of Russian. A third
possibility would of course be the IPA [O] Ɔɔ, which has a
capital version in Unicode \u0186. The Cyrillic (ab)uses of
schwa (See WP <http://tinyurl.com/yqm5uk>) may cause one to
doubt how plausible it is, but at least Soviet scholars knew
IPA, and upside-down ess for a vowel is at least no stranger
than upside-down cee.

FWIW IPA [O] Ɔɔ seems more likely than å in New
Turkic too.

BTW all Soviet Cyrillic alphabets always included the full
Russian alphabet, even if some letters were not used in
native words, and notably all the j+vowel letters were
normally used like in Russian.
--

/BP 8^)
--
Benct Philip Jonsson
mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"If a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,
of what language, pray, is Basque a dialect?" (R.A.B.)

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