Re: I need an artist ::: and articles

>On Mon, 18 Jan 1999, Rhialto wrote:
>
>>First, I thought I might share my system for articles with y'all.
>/mercilessly cut/
>Nice
Glad you liked it. Demua is growing all teh time (current vocab of about 90
words).

>
>>------------------------------
>>I need an artist to help me design an alphabet, as all I know about art
>>packages can comfortably fit on the tip of a pin.
>
>Art packages as in Computerized Art, grapcics programs? If
>not, all you need is a pencil, lotsa paper and enormous
>amounts of patience and drive :)
>
>Pencil is much preferable I think, when something usable has
>been worked out I sketch the alphabet with a black pen and
>scan it in, or fire up some drawing-prog and jot in pixel by
>pixel, which is a bit harder to do and gives an edgy look.

Bah. No scanner, and drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of
soap. I would draw it by hand, but with no way to get it digital, it would
be pointless. For a while, I played with the idea of pinching Japanese
characters, but that would force teh sounds to change, which would confuse
my J studies no end. Tolkien runes have too many gaps in the phonology, and
I didn't really like teh appearance of the elvish font he did.

>>consonants
>>----------
>>Series 1: Stops and nasals use the same set of characters,
>>but use diacritics to distinguish between voiced/unvoiced/nasal.
>>
>>P B M
>>T D N
>>K G Ng
>
>Since v/uv/n is marked by diacritics, the place of
>articulation 'stem' for the stops should be very dissimilar
>from eachother.

Umm, translation please, Mr Spock? I dont understand 'articulation stem'.

>>Series 2: Fricatives and Affricatives use
>>the voicing accent found in stops.
>>
>>F V
>>Q J (Q is a ch, or glottal stop if at end of word)
>>S Z
>>X   (X is a sh)
>>H
[snip]


Q - ch in church
X - sh in shine (just a normal strongly pronounced E sh)
H - h in horse (never silent of softened)

I considered having a voiced X /zh/, but 1) I ran out of consonants and 2)
it would have made the language too sybylant for my tastes. Marking X as an
accented S would not be good. the voice diacritic is taken by Z and X isnt
exactly a nasal sound, and I want to keep the meaning of the diacritics
pure.

>So 'unvoiced' has no diacritic?

correct. yes, I know, technically, H is voiced, but it seemed silly having
an accented character and no plain equivalent. An unvoiced H was rejected
for similar reasons to the voiced X.

>>vowels
>>------
>>a   e  i  o  u
>>ar  er    or
>>aj  ej    oj
>>au  ee ii oo uu

That grid explained...

=hat   =bed   =hit   =hot   =put
#harp  #her          #saw
*my    *day          *by
*how   *hair  #heat  *hope  #too

*dipthong
#long
=short

Hmm, maybe heat and too should be moved up 2 rows? Like I say, I know vowels
like the back of my neck (now theres an idiom!)

short A and short U are particularly wide, and cover several distinct vowel
sounds in IPA, but those shown are most typical.

>The two lowest rows... are they diphthongs or geminates? And
>the second row... rhoticized?

Whats a geminate?  Seriously, I never herard the term before. Some of those
are dipthongs, but dont ask me which, I dont really understand vowels too
well. None of these are rhoticised. The only function of teh R in romanised
Demua is to mark certain vowels.

>If you have long vowels, the diacritic marking length can be
>used to mark geminate vowels as well, if you should add such
>later.

If I understood these terms, I would tell you :(

I currently have all the consonants and vowels that I want, but Im sure the
vowels as arranged in teh grid could be re-aranged to better reflect how
vowels actually work. Some of those vowels are long, some are dipthongs. The
idea was that only one vowel character would appear in a single syllable.

Any vowel gurus know how that vowel table should be arranged?

---
Rhialto
wau miliwafeng
[translation: farewell]