Re: +AFs-CONLANG+AF0- Vowel romanization

John:
> 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.
I agree. A conlang might itself start a new branch of the tradition,
introducing into the family of roman letters a character never
hitherto used alongside them.

> > [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.
I sort of knew that, except I (wrongly, I do not doubt) thought it was
Eskimo, not Saami, and I had a sense that the orthography did not evolve
indigenously and that it doesn't date back beyond some time in the 19th
century. The Livagian romanization would predate this.

--And.