Re: Terzemian on the web

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 15:31:42 -0500, Benct Philip Jonsson
<conlang@...> wrote:

> 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
>  >> *gh > G_h\ doesn't seen realistic to me. I'd sooner
>  >> expect *g_h > h\
>  >
>  > 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,
That's very interesting indeed. I have very little idea yet how I'm going
to get from PIE to the mouthfeel I want to have at this point, but I
suspect I may have to do some reasonably nonstraightforward stuff too.

>  > 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
[snip very interesting discussion of Neo-Tocharian]

I wish I was that clever.

>  >> 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.
>  >> 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...
It's the way I've decided to go, with the bottom three vowels /a/, /A/,
/Q/ using A-Umlaut, A, A-Ring in Latin, and Schwa, A, Turned-C, in
Cyrillic and UTA. I've gone with Alef Kasratan for /a/ in the Arabic
script. In all honestly, I'm pulling characters out of thin air for the
Arabic so far, but it's the only script nobody has questioned yet, so I'm
taking that as tacit approval.

>  >> 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!
Not the folks at work. I have a decent amount of latitude at work.
Admittedly, I don't get to play with musty old tomes, but I tend to get to
do whatever it takes when needed.

I was working more on the "anything that is not absolutely needed is
absolutely banned" principle, also known as the KISS principle. Reports
suggest I have overshot the mark.



Paul



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