Re: +AFs-CONLANG+AF0- Vowel romanization

And Rosta scripsit:

> As Herman implicitly says in his reply, the roman alphabet is a tradition,
> a family of sets of letters, rather than a single set of letters. The
> crux is whether such and such a character is 'traditionally' used with
> the roman alphabet.
I quite agree.  The question is, how old does a tradition have to be
to count as traditional?

The Latin-alphabet writing systems for African languages are typically
more recent than the IPA, and often show influence from it; but because
they are now handed down from teacher to student as part of literacy,
I believe these writing systems are now as traditional as the English
or French ones, though admittedly the tradition does not go as far
back.

> [T]o use eng would, in the Livagian view, not count as a romanization
And yet the Saami use eng in upper and lower case for the only orthography
their languages have ever had.

Ray Brown scripsit:

> In fact, the dual alphabet system is an odd aberration, found only, I
> believe, in the modern Roman, Greek & Cyrillic systems.
Armenian, too.  As for Georgian, it evolved both uppercase (asomtavruli)
and lowercase (nusxuri) forms in exactly the same way as Latin script
did, but the entire system was discarded for all purposes except the
ecclesiastical in favor of the "military", or mxedruli, system, which is
unicameral and in use today.  There have been a few experiments with
writing modern Georgian in a bicameral alphabet using asomtavruli and
mxedruli forms, but they have never caught on.  Unicode currently uses
the same encodings for nusxuri and mxedruli, but this is scheduled to
change in the next version.

As for the paper wasps, their nest material is made from digested wood
pulp, and is paper under even the narrowest possible definition.

--
Dream projects long deferred            John Cowan <jcowan@...>
usually bite the wax tadpole.            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --James Lileks                  http://www.reutershealth.com

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