Re: Terzemian on the web

Paul Bennett skrev:
 > 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.

Who am I to complain! Have a look at my own pages on the
wiki!

 >> *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.

OK I see. I always found the way breathy voice converted
into tones in Panjabi interesting. Consider these Hindi and
Panjabi cognates:

:     Hindi     Panjabi      meaning
:
:     gho.ra    kó.ra        horse
:     ko.ra     ko.ra        whip
:     ko.rha    kò.ra        leper

Where _gh_ = /g_h\/, _.r_ = /r`/ and _.rh_ = /r`_h\/, acute
is high tone, grave is low tone and no accent is mid tone.
and in each word _o_ is the stressed vowel.

Thus a breathy consonant -- including /h\/ itself --
depressed the pitch of a following stressed vowel but raised
the pitch of a preceding stressed vowel, the latter possibly
in anticipation of a low pitch on a following unstressed
vowel, which was later reinterpreted as a low tone on the
stressed vowel. Thus Panjabi would seem to be a pitch accent
language rather than a tone language, BTW. I honestly don't
know if a word can have more than one tone. NB /h\/ as
opposed to 'voiced aspirates' merged with zero leaving
behind the expected tones.

FYI the 'horse' word is _gho.taka_ /g_h\ot`@k@/ in Sanskrit.
The final /A/ is a contraction of the Prakrit nominative _-
ako_, apparently by way of /@?U/ > /@U/.

 >
 >> 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.

Cyrillic omega was used only sporadically in Greek words, in
a small closed set of words -- notably the vocative particle
borrowed from Greek and the preposition _ot_ -- and as a
numeral. Thus even in Church Slavic omega was rare and
highly marked. The best choices for an additional back vowel
in a pre-Soviet orthography are the hard sign/hard jer or
the big yus Ѫѫ, which in Old Church Slavic was a nasal
back vowel of undetermined an geographically variable height
-- in Bulgarian Church Slavic it became /@/ and was used for
/@/ in pre-WWII Bulgarian orthography, while in Russian and
Ukrainian CS it was /u/. NB that it went out of use in
Russian as opposed to CS it went out of use so early that it
didn't exist anymore in 19th century orthography. For the
hard jer it should be noted that when pronounced at all it
is /o/ in Russian and Ukrainian CS.

The 19th century Cyrillic orthography for my own Neo-
Tocharian has only one /o/, but it does have an /e/--/E/ and
an /a/--/@/ distinction. I've used the following symbols:

: І, Ї      Ы       У, Ю    :  i, ji      i\        u, ju
:                           :
:   И, Е    Ъ, Ѣ    О, Ӧ/Ё  :    e, je    @, j@     o, jo
:                           :
:       Э, Є        А, Я    :       E, jE           A, jA

where the /j@/ letter is jat', in case you can't see it. I
needed a three-way /;/--/@/--/j@/ distinction, for which Ь--Ъ--
Ѣ (jat') was the obvious choice; otherwise I'd probably use
І /i/ И /ji/ Е /e/ ѣ (jat') /je/. The script also will
use Ѳ (fita) for /T/ and Ѕ (dze) for /D/, and perhaps also
Ґ (Ukrainian g) for [g] although that sound is an allophone
of /N/ -- Г is /G/ and /N/ is НГ since /nG/ can't occur
in the language.

The intra-fictional idea is that the a native scholar
improved on an orthography created by Russian missionaries
by making the distinctions /e/--/E/, /@/--/A/, /T/--/f/, /D/--
/z/ and perhaps
[g]--/G/ which they had missed. There is also a /s`/--/s\/
    distinction which they may or may not have missed, since
    Russian has perfectly cromulent letters for that
    distinction, but the posh pronunciation of Щ was still
    [s\ts\] at the time. Since the idea is that the reformer
    had access to a combined 19th century Russian and Roman
    cast of type he might well have used Roman G for [g] and
    perhaps Roman J for the /z\/ into which Classical
    Tocharian /j/ and secondarily voiced(*) /s\/ had merged.

(*)It is thought that Tocharian B (and probably also A) only
had one series of 'stops', but that these had the following
allophones:

:       #_    V_V    [nasal]_
:       _#    C_V
:       CC
:       _C
:
:  /p/  p     B      b
:
:  /t/  t     D      d
:
:  /k/  k     G      /nG/=[N]

I've just differentiated this a bit, extended it to
sibilants and let it be phonemicized by syncope and apocope
of vowels:

:       #_, _#,  V_V    C_V    [nas]_
:       CC, _C
:
:  /p/  p        B > v  P > f  mb > b
:
:  /t/  t        D      T      nd > d
:
:  /k/  k        G      x      N ( änk > g / #_)
:
:  /c/  tS       Z      S      ndZ > dZ
:
:  /s/  s        z      s      nz > ~z > z (or ndz > dz)
:
:  /s`/ S        Z      S      nZ > ~Z > Z (or ndZ > dZ)
:
:  /s\/ s\       z\     s\     nz\ > ~z\ > z\ (or ndz\ > dz\)

Syncope of Classical _ä_ and reduced vowels gives new
contrastive nasal+obstruent clusters and new/more stop and
fricative clusters which are later restructured in various
ways, so that all the allophones are eventually
phonemicized. Aphesis of _ä_ creates instances of initial
fricatives and voiced stops. Apocope of final original
monophthongs also contribute to the phonemicization.

 >> 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.

Looks plausible both in Cyrillic and UTA. It seems on the
whole both from the extended Cyrillic and the Uniform Turkic
alphabets that Soviet alphabet makers preferred modified
letters over diacritics -- contrary to my prefs, but if one
wants realism one needs to take such into account.

 > 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".

I can sympathize with the principle, although I FWIW would
prefer ŭ to ъ, ĭ to ь. I tend to prefer diacritics to
modified letters in handritten notes -- not least if I can
use the same diacritics on shorthand too! :-) Likewise I
use punctuation+letter combinations like .t and ;s in plain
text files.

 > 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.

Ha! Have a look at
<http://wiki.frath.net/User:Melroch/Rhodrese>; that's
confused notes *on* 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...

Nah, I like ö and ü in New Latin, and ä /a/ å /Q/ a /A/
would be nice too. Azeri rather horrifyingly kepts schwa for
/&/ in their New Latin...

 >
 >> 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.

You mean the folks at work will go after you for one more
line in a printout? By comparison at my uni library it is
formally forbidden to take photocopies out of 100+ y.o.
books, but they don't actually complain unless the book is
150+ y.o. Not to speak of copying any book entirely, which
is strictly forbidden but completely ignored!
--

/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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