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Re: +AFs-CONLANG+AF0- Vowel romanization

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Saturday, February 21, 2004, 2:39
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.

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Joe <joe@...>