Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

From: "Isaac A. Penzev" <isaacp@...>

| Danny Wier scripsit:
|
| <<It's really hard to express a language with a large phonology with Latin
| script.
| Either you use numerous diacritics, or invent new letters (like Abkhaz did,
but
| it's Cyrillic).>>
|
| ...or use di- and trigraphs. Why not?

If you notice a lot of my posts, I come out as prejudiced against digraphs,
trigraphs, tetragraphs. That's because my native language is English, which is
obviously the language of the Devil, but it somehow functions with all those
ridiculous spelling conventions. Tetragraphs. English has <ough> with six
pronunciations, Polish has <szcz> for /StS/, Kabardian has Cyrillic <kx"w> (" =
hard sign) for /qw/ (non-ejective).

Polygraphs (that word reminds me too much of lie detectors, ugh) are okay if you
have few clusters and lots of vowels. It's perfectly fine with regular CV
structure. Actually I've seen orthographies for Berber languages that use <sh>,
<gh>, and <kh> which I hate because I just like <x> better; they work, since C +
h sequences seem to be rare. Esperanto does just fine with digraphs, replacing
the circumflex with <h> (or that ugly <x> convention which is nonetheless very
convenient with computers and eliminates all ambiguity).

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