Idea for Roman orthography.

For a conlang I sketched out several years ago, I used
a kludge of the Roman alphabet that would fit into the
basic Latin character set, and eventually, I expanded
on the idea until I got what was pretty much
satisfactory for my purposes. Basically, the idea was
to represent the sounds of a Celtic-style language,
but without using clunky diagraphs or an excess of
accent marks.

I used only a drastically-stripped-down set of
letters, namely, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M,
N, O, P, R, S, T and U assigning basically German
values to each to fit a phonemic inventory that looked
something like this:

[p], [b], [f], [v], [m]
[t], [d], [T], [D], [n]
[s], [z]
[k], [g], [x], [N]
[?], [h]
[w], [j], [l], [4]
[a], [i], [u], [e], [o], [y], [2] and [&]

Because of the ridiculous number of homographs that
would be the certain result, I used the acute accent
mark as a helper to disambiguate, giving me word pairs
like this:

/tas/ [tas]
/tás/ [Tas]
/sanga/ [saNa]
/sánga/ [saN.ga]

And so on. There was a vague sort of order to this
system; the accent marks usually were used on words
that were less-common, and often were pressed to
indicate things like fricativization of [t] and [d] to
[T] and [D], and a couple of other functions. Still a
bit of a load on the memory to bear in mind the exact
pronunciations of each word, but at least there was
some sort of method to the disorder.

Has anyone else done anything like this; i.e., a
limited-character-set Roman alphabet that
disambiguates minimal pairs without excessive reliance
on diagraphs or diacritics?


	

	
		
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