Re: Consonant allophones in Minza

T. A. McLeay wrote:
> Hello from the same hemisphere as most readers, for a change!
>
> Philip Newton wrote:
>> On 9/28/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>>> In a conlang sketch, I once used
>>>
>>>     |a e i o u| for /a e i o u/ (/a/ as more like [A]),
>>> and |ä ë ï ö ü| for /& V M 2 y/.
>>>
>>> Maybe it would be an option for you?  This way, you have the diaeresis
>>> as a 'swap front-back' diacritic and still retain the standard values
>>> for the unmarked vowels.  Furthermore, only |ë| and |ï| are lightly
>>> off-standard.
>>
>> And since /M/ is the value of Turkish dotless-i (AFAIK), you could
>> think of the second dot in |ï| "cancelling out" the first one,
>> resulting in a dotless-i, for which /M/ is an accepted pronunciation.
>> IYSWIM.
>
>  From what I've seen, Turkic linguists often use ï for the (phonemic)
> high back vowel. I can't remember if any language has three back
> unrounded vowels, and if so whether the middle one is marked by ë.
Vietnamese has ư, ơ, â, a. The unrounded vowels in Minza are central,
but are grouped with the back vowels for determining the allophones of
adjacent consonants in the same syllable. Turkish dotless-i is a
possibility for /1/, with the slight difficulty that I'd have to adopt
the Turkish dotted capital İ for /i/ as the first letter of a name or at
the start of a sentence.

> As for Minza's orthography, I myself am partial to digraphs and,
> considering the allophony of preceding consonants, a system like
>
>       ia ie i  io iu for /& e i 2 y/
>   and ua ue ui uo u  for /a V M o u/
>
> strikes my fancy. /g/ vs /G~j\/ might be spelt using an e/o afterwards
> instead, so "gia" = [g&] but "gea" = [j\&]; "gua" = [ga] but "goa" = [Ga].
Unfortunately Minza has a bunch of diphthongs, including /ie/ and /uo/.
That could get complicated.