Re: Consonant allophones in Minza

Sorry for late reply. I accidentally saved the mail in the
draft folder instead of sending it!

Herman Miller skrev:
 > In the latest update to the Minza phonology, I've decided
 > that the retroflex and post-alveolar consonants are
 > allophones; retroflex when adjacent to back vowels, and
 > post-alveolar next to front vowels. Along with this
 > change, I'm introducing at least one and possibly up to
 > three new vowel distinctions. (A single consonant between
 > two vowels belongs to the following syllable, so its
 > allophone is determined by the following vowel).
 > Additionally, the velar consonants have palatal
 > allophones. Now, there are a couple of issues with this:
 >
 > For one, although it's technically possible to have post-
 > alveolar nasals and laterals, it seems like it would be
 > hard to make the three-way distinction between alveolar,
 > post-alveolar, and palatal. Minza doesn't have a velar
 > lateral, but older versions of Minza do have a velar
 > nasal, and I'd originally planned to reintroduce it. One
 > possibility is that the velar nasal only occurs next to
 > back vowels.

I'd rather expect a nasal which is platal next to front
vowels and velar next to back vowels, like the voiced
fricative. In fact I'd expect all velars to behave the same,
as in modern Greek.

 > The other thing is a writing issue: how to spell a sound
 > that alternates between [G] and [j\], similar to what
 > happens in Modern Greek.

Clearly YOGH Ȝ ȝ \u021C \u021D which was similarly used in
Middle English -- the name of the letter itself was ȝoȝ.
The drawback is that it has bad font coverage, but you can
always use EZH Ʒ ʒ \u01B7 \u0292 as a stopgap, even though
it doesn't look right, to confound the two is a Bad Thing
and its font coverage is only marginally better -- it is
covered by Tahoma at least. At a pinch one may even use
Cyrillic ZE З з \u0417 \u0437, whose font coverage is much
better, as a stopgap.

But as you said later

 > Actually, the Greek gamma doesn't look too out of place in
 > the middle of words in the Latin alphabet

Having read quite an amount of Iranist and Altaicist
literature I can only agree!

You also said


 > I don't know if I'd want to go so far as to mix Cyrillic
 > characters in with the gamma

Ғғ \u0492 \u0493 seems to be the righter thing in
Cyrillic, or Ҕҕ \u0494 \u0495 which somehow looks more
palatalized, but has poorer font coverage.

[snip]

 > For the vowels, it's tempting to use a diacritic for all
 > front vowels:
 >
 >:  Front: ï ë ä ö ü
 >:  Back:  ı e a o u
 >
 > But then one of the most common vowels would be ï and
 > there'd be dots everywhere. Well, more dots than i's
 > normally have.... At the very least I'll likely be adding
 > an /ä/ vowel; /ö/ and /ü/ are possible but marginal
 > additions. In any case, with all these marks over both the
 > vowels and consonants, it might look better to just use
 > digraphs for the extra consonants.
 >
 > Another possibility which might look nicer is to use dots
 > under the letters for back vowels.
 >
 >:  Front: i e a
 >:  Back:  ị ẹ ạ o u

I'd be most inclined to use

:  Front: i e ä ö ü
:  Back:  y ė a o u

Ė ė \u0116 \u0117 actually has good font coverage, but I'd
certaily use ë for a vowel in the @-7-V range to make
things simple.

 > But if I use "y" for the high central vowel, "γy" (with
 > gamma for /G/) is an awkward-looking combination.

I agree with that. I'm even bothered by gj in Scandinavian
orthographies and jy (not to mention jyy) in Finnish, so in
this case I'd come down tout americaniste and use

:  Front: i e ä ö ü
:  Back:  ï ë a o u

In which case I might even use y for [G]/[j\]. It is both in
use for [j] and looks vaguely like a gamma! In fact the
Swedish Dialect Alphabet uses gamma for a back velar
fricative, Roman y for a front velar fricative and script y
for [y], so I'm kinda used to something similar! :-)

Paul Bennet wrote:

 > Another option for /@/ might be a-breve, a-caron, or
 > something along those lines.

No no, a-caron is the Iranist [&]!


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No man forgets his original trade: the rights of
nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar,
if grammarians discuss them.
-Dr. Samuel Johnson (1707 - 1784)

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