Re: Consonant allophones in Minza

Henrik 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.
Well, Albanian uses "ë" for /@/, so that would work; Americanist
phonetic notation uses "ï" and "ë" for back vowels, but the Minza sounds
are actually central and slightly rounded.

> Or how about using Cyrillic/Greek letters?  Maybe gamma for [G j\]?
> By this, you get rid of diacritics *and* digraphs.  Actually, a revision
> of the above mentioned sketch does exactly that:
I've been considering a Cyrillic spelling for Minza, especially if I
decide to split the central phonemes into front rounded /y/ /2/ and
central unrounded /1/ /3/, for a total of 10 distinctive vowels. The
difficulty is that the basic Cyrillic alphabet doesn't have a symbol for
the common Minza consonant /K/, which I've been writing as "ł".

Actually, the Greek gamma doesn't look too out of place in the middle of
words in the Latin alphabet: arγa, fulγa, γäiγa, γälika, γemet, γüluŋ,
łuγu, möγïlör, muγä, nelγä, paγë, rëγa, tšaγïl, xraγu. I don't know if
I'd want to go so far as to mix Cyrillic characters in with the gamma,
so "nelγä" ends up as "nelγя" and "tšaγïl" as "tшaγыl" (or "чaγыl");
that doesn't quite look the way I'd like for it to look.

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