Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: +AFs-CONLANG+AF0- Vowel romanization

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Saturday, February 21, 2004, 14:43
Herman Miller wrote:

>And Rosta wrote: > > > >>Your romanization options seem to go beyond what I would think of as a >>romanization, in that they use nonalphabetical characters. So I can't >>quite grasp the rationale or the problem: if you can go outside the roman >>alphabet, surely there is a great array of symbols available for use? >>If you have to stick with roman letters, then you'd have to fall back on >>diacritics and digraphs. >> >> > >The "open e" and "open o" are used in some African languages. The >letters with dots under them are used in Vietnamese (but not for the >same sounds -- the Vietnamese dot is a tone mark). The Cyrillic z for an >open-mid central vowel is an arbitrary substitution for a reversed open >e, but Zhuang uses it for a tone letter, which doesn't have anything to >do with its actual use in the Cyrillic alphabet. The main thing I want >to avoid are letters that don't have upper and lower case versions. >Limitations of font technology in Windows put restrictions on which >capital letters can have diacritics added to them. Some Greek letters >could potentially be of use, but the problem with Greek vowel letters is >that their upper case forms look like Latin letters. But I'd like to >stick with the Roman alphabet or extra letters that are traditionally >used with the Roman alphabet, rather than borrowing arbitrary characters >from other scripts. I've only considered the Cyrillic z because it looks >like the IPA character [3], and I haven't come up with a better >representation for that sound. > > > >
Indeed. And, if his argument is correct, English doesn't use the roman alphabet - w? j? u? Svrely, vve shovld all vvrite like this. That vvay vve vvovld be staying vvithin the bovnds of the roman alphabet as vsed by Ivlivs Caesar.

Replies

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
And Rosta <a.rosta@...>