Re: If Tech was written in Arabic script... (long post)

From: "Shreyas Sampat" <shreyas@...>

> This is all very interesting, and raises some questions...
> What environment(s) or phenomen(on/a) cause lenition?
First of all, thanks for responding; I thought my overly Tech-nical ;) post
might've bored everybody to death.

I don't have all the specifics down for lenition yet, but the two main types
of initial mutation, lenition and nasalization (which I didn't mention in my
proposal) are basically taken from Celtic languages. Lenition in the form of
spirantization of stops occurs in Hebrew and Syriac, another influence.
Basically, initial consonants (that means phrase-initial, not just word;
Tech has "group inflection") are fortis; so are geminated consonants
medially and finally. Ungeminiated medial and final consonants are lenis;
the rules are slightly different for certain consonants in final position
and before another consonant, which becomes fortis in that case (I call it
Type II lenition, which cause /s/ > /h/ and the ejectives also function
differently; that too I have to figure out).

Nasalization is similar to Welsh, it follows nasal-final words and causes
the following:

/b/ > |mb| > /m/
/p/ > |mp| > /m_h/
/p_>/ > |mp'| > /mb_</

The second and third nasals are voiceless-aspirated and prenasalized
implosive.

> What causes umlaut?
Basically vowel harmony, but the vowel that causes the harmony often
disappears, leaving its mark on the preceding vowel, so a word like |tobi|
in Proto-Tech becomes /t2b'/. This too I have to work out the details for.

> Would you recommend a particular place to learn the abjad?  I made some
> attempt to long ago, but apparently I didn't learn all of it; you seem to
> have a great deal of letters whose names I don't recognize.
You can learn the Arabic abjad online in a number of places. I recommend
Omniglot because they give descriptions of lots of different writing
systems, and they include many languages written in Arabic script, including
Persian and Urdu.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm should get you started.

Tech will eventually have to add additional letters, unless I decide to keep
it an ambiguous and arbitrary method of writing like English. I was thinking
of different consonantal characters with three dots above (like kheh with
three dots above for /C/ or "ich-laut", daad with three dots above for
/dz/...)

~Danny~

~Danny~

~Danny~

>  (I'm a big fan of scripts, con- and nat-, and con-usages of natscripts.
> I'm of the school of thought that orthogrphy is as integral to the spirit
of
> an artlang as is phonology, in transcription to Latin and native, whatever
> native may be.)
>
> ---
> Shreyas
>