Re: Ebisedian orthography facelift

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 08:11:43PM +0100, Joe wrote:
[snip]
> After looking at Ebisedian again, I suggest you change ø to something
> more a-like, as it is just a backed 'a', and in all languages that I
> know of, it is written as an a-like character.
Well, to me, it's more o-ish than a-ish, which is why I chose o-slash in
the first place. :-) This is probably a perception from the English 'o'
which often gets realized as [A] or [O]. In any case, [A], [Q], [V], and
[O] are all allophonic in Ebisedian.

> Probably I'd suggest an alpha, as that's free, and you seem to like
> Greek letters.  Also, it corresponds to the IPA symbol.
It'd look too much like 'o', and also too much like 'a'. The whole point
of using o-slash is to distinguish it from 'o', since in my mind the two
are very similar.

And I'm not sure if I like Greek letters *that* much; it's just a source
of additional vowel glyphs to make up for the poverty of vowels in the
Roman alphabet. (I mean, what *do* you do if you have 9 vowels and 27
consonants all fighting to be represented by a mere 26 letters?)

The reason I chose dotless /i/ rather than the normal 'i' was because of
laziness: I was writing the orthography-to-LaTeX program, and it was
easier not to have to worry about removing the dot when the letter needs
to be accented. Other than that, it's really just a normal i. But since I
had chosen it to be dotless, the iota glyph fits that role better than
dotless i.

Same thing with the omega: I had settled with the English w, but it looked
too wide under a macron. The omega looks much more comfortable with vowel
diacritics, so I used it in place of w. But it's really just a stylized w,
as much as the iota is a stylized i robbed of its dot. :-)

But the *real* solution is for me to get off my lazy bum and work on the
_sanoki'_;[1] then I can dispense with the vowel-impoverished Roman
alphabet. :-)

[1] Which might then give Ebisedian a rather Oriental flavor ... isn't it
interesting how little squiggles on the page can change one's perception
of a language so much? :-)


T

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