Re: Atlantean Corpus

SOO-puhk TEH-wuhn-toap,

Well, I've looked through the new corpus and have a few thoughts, mostly
that a lot of it is really confusing, but I think the first thing we need
to decide is what we're going to do about spelling Atlantean.  Do you think
that the "phonetic" transcriptions used in the script are the best way to
go about it, or should we use another system?  I personally don't like the
look of the "phonetic" spellings like SOO-puhk and GAH-moak, besides which
they're inefficient in their use of letters and (I think) the hyphens
separating syllables sometimes obscure the boundaries between stem and
ending.

In this article, http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-film.html?2001-
05/25/10.00.film , we see that that's not the system Marc Okrand used:
"He made a phonetic transcript of the Atlantean lines in the script, 'so I
would know what I meant.' Yes is 'tig,' no is 'kwam,' and hello
is 'supak.'"
_Supak_ is transcribed as "SOO-puhk" in the Disney Adventures magazine,
suggesting that the schwa sound (or whatever 'uh' represents; I don't know
a terrible amount about phonetics) would be written as the letter a.  But
the word Marc Okrand writes as 'kwam' is transcribed in the screenplay
as "kwahm".  I _think_ the difference is when /a/ appears in a stressed
syllable it is 'ah' but is 'uh' in an unstressed one.  I haven't done a
detailed check so far, but the examples I looked at seemed to fit the
pattern.  I found the same distinction between the sounds 'ee' and 'ih'
([i] and [I], I think): "ee" only occurs in stressed syllables and 'ih' in
unstressed ones.  So for my site, I adopted this spelling while adding
acute accents over the vowels of stressed syllables.  Thus the
sentence "LEH-weg-tem SHEE-buhn puhk BEN-tem DEE-gen-mil SAH-tib" turns out
like _Léwegtem shíban pak béntem dígenmil sátib_.

Does this make sense, or would you prefer to use another system?  Does
anyone have examples of writing in the Atlantean alphabet to say how that
works?

GAH-moak,

Paul

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