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Of Haa/hhet & other matters (was: mu for [N])

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, January 22, 2005, 7:26
On Friday, January 21, 2005, at 12:32 , Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi! > > Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> writes:
[snip]
>> Noooooo, you can't represent _Haa_/_hhet_ using a _`ay(i)n_-looking >> symbol!!! That's just *wrong*! :-P
Quite right!
>> I use |hh| myself, usually. >> |x| could work, if it's not already taken for /x/. >> If you're not adverse to using numbers, Arabic-speakers commonly use >> |7| to transliterate it. >> Other possible symbols: >> |#| (looks like barred-H) >> |q| it's back-of-the-mouth-y >> |j| like Spanish /x/~/X/, just a little more back. > > So many suggestions! :-) > > First of all, I don't like using non-letter symbols for phonemes > because I don't like the look of words with symbols. They have no > upper case (|µ| also doesn't,
But |µ| certainly does have an upper case. Look in ant Greek textbook - it' s |M| :) But why do we need both upper and lower case forms? Mainly just Greek-derived alphabets that seem to feel the need. Arabic, Hebrew, the many Indian scripts, Burmese, Thai and others seem to get along happily without separate upper & lower case.
> hmm...) and they seem to -- hmmm -- > destroy the look of words. Very subjective thingy, of course.
Yes, indeed. I wonder if many centuries ago there were not some scribes thinking the Norman |w| destroyed the look of words, and clung to the old Saxon wynn :) [snip]
> Currently unoccupied letters: > labials: |b|, |p|, |m|, |f|, |v|, |w| > other: |j|, |l|, |c|, |y|, |z|
The solution's obvious - |c| ha been used for practically everything else, so I don't think it will mind being a voiceless pharyngeal fricative :) Yes, I know the Somalis used it for the voiced pharyngeal fricative; but if |c| can survive being pronounce {T] in Castile and [D] in Fiji, [tS] in Italy and [dZ] in Turkey, I am sure it will survive being pronounced [?\].
> More problems: vowels & tones: since the language has tones, which I > *must* (:-)) represent with diacritics in order to avoid symbols (and > I don't like letters for tones either), I have problems due to the > existence of a schwa: there is a nice unicode letter for it, but my > browser fails to compose schwas with acute or grave accent. So I > used |e|. However, uvulars and pharyngeals shift the articulation > of /i/ to [e], and I want to represent this orthographically, too. > *Sigh*
The Welsh have been using |y| for ages to represent /@/. But I notice that while there are characters in Unicode for y-acute, y-circumflex and y-diaeresis, there does not seem to be one for y-grave - strange. Ray ======================================================= http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com ======================================================= "If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything can change into anything" Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

Replies

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>