Re: Optimum number of symbols

Kendra wrote:
> Ah, that's cool, and efficient! :) It must be a lot clearer to read, than,
> say, japanese, where (if, for some cheese forsaken reason, you decided to
> write english in it) you'd end up with a lot of vowels between consonants
> and be generally confused for a good few minutes...
Well, the schwa symbols are lost now.  I suppose in theory someone could
combine multiple diacritics on a character to spell, say, tafs, maybe
moving it on top for sta type syllables.  But, it would be impossible to
write, say, _tak_ in the standard syllabry.  Chúju, a descendant that
I'm working on, does have such syllables, so some kind of modification
will be necessary to show it.

> My friend Jeff's new alphabet thing (I think it's syllabic, but I'm not
> really sure) has characters for possessives and plurals and such, but he
> only ever uses his to write in English.
So, would he write "man-plural" for "men"?

> Would you then 'spell' things differently for different dialects, then? If,
> for instance (please pardon my butchering, I'm simply curious) someone
> pronounced "uifkal" with an o instead of an a sound, would it still be
> written U-If-KA-L?
Well, actually, there is no /o/ in Uatakassi, but different dialects
would spell things differently.  For example, a change present in most
dialects of Low Uatakassi changes /l/ to /w/ after /a/, so that "book"
would be "uifkau", that would be written U-If-KA-U, if you were to write
in dialect.  Of course, writing in dialect is considered ignorant, but
there are a lot of people who do, simply because they can write, but
they don't know the standard dialect.  :-)  And, I'm sure there'd be
some hypercorrection, like someone writing what should be _au_ in the
standard dialect as _al_.

A scan of the syllabry can be found here:
http://Nik_Taylor.tripod.com/Conlang/Syllabry.html

I've since decided that the _uafa_ character is also obsolete, despite
what it says in the description

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