Re: Terzemian on the web

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:38:15 -0500, Benct Philip Jonsson
<conlang@...> wrote:

> Paul Bennett skrev:
>  > http://wiki.frath.net/Terzemian
>  >
>  > Right now, there's not much to see,
> It looks fine. I just wonder about two or three things:
>
> Is the sound change section complete? It doesn't give that
> impression.
It's not even nearly complete. I'd hardly classify it as "started", to be
honest.

> *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?
I'm keeping _h as a quasi-distinct quasi-phoneme for now. I do have plans
in the general direction of changing things. Tone and/or phonation may
have roles to play.

> The Cyrillic omega Ѡѡ for /Q/ å doesn't seem realistic to
> me.
It's a Greek omega rather than a Cyrillic one, but that does not detract
much (if at all) from your point.

> 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.
I may well give the Cyrillic script pre-1918 origins, even if only with an
informal nature, to retcon in my more difficult choices. If there were
texts in Old Cyrillic (or at least pre-reform Cyrillic) using the Cyrillic
omega, it might provide a basis for the use the only living and
commonly-printable omega when Cyrillic use was officially codified.

> So what might a Soviet orthography use for /Q/?
One pretty much has to put on a blindfold and throw darts at a chart of
Latin, Cyrillic, IPA, and anything else that happens to wander near the
dartboard.

> N.B. that Turkic a is /A/, and moreover the letters
> а and о are closely related to Russian orthographic
> sensibilities.
Good to know, times two. I may make it /a/, /A/ and /Q/, in which case
I'll have perfectly acceptable uses for both Әә and Ɔɔ.

Ladies and gentlemen, we may have a winner. We're going to have to wait
for the final word from the judges, though.

> Another possibility is the hard sign Ъъ for
> å, since that letter was actually made useful in some
> Soviet orthographies.
I'll be using ъ in my sound changes for ŭ, along with ь for ĭ and ы for
"undifferentiated close vowel".

My sound change notation will likely be rather divergent from the IPA
right up until the final stages before the modern era -- it's easier for
me to work symbolically for certain things (e.g. ƀ, đ, ǥ for "soft"
consonants (a la Germanic), without getting bogged down in premature use
of featural systems that may turn out to be wrong later), and reflects
that common problem in historical linguistics: "We know there was a velar
of some kind, probably a voiced stop or nasal, but we don't know what
exactly it was".

That I'll have a use for the hard sign does not automatically preclude it
being used in the Cyrillic mode, I suppose. I foresee my notes getting
very confusing indeed, and hard to decode when they're ready for the wiki.

> FWIW IPA [O] Ɔɔ seems more likely than å in New
> Turkic too.
It would also be quite pretty as a companion to Ө ө as a shared character
between Cyrillic and UTA, and maybe even Modern Latin. Hmm... Dot...
Dot... Dot...

> 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.
Cool. I was aiming for space-efficiency, but there's a decent amount of
paper attached to these here Intertubes, so I may as well be hung for a
sheep.



Paul




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