Re: Orthography of palatalized consonants

Spanish-speakers I work with NEVER use the word "tilde," and I was blanking on
it--thanks!!
This convention of doubled letters reminds me that I just learned that New
Testament Greek doubled the gamma to represent the sound English spells as
"ng"; does modern Greek still do this?
Krista

>===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
<CONLANG@...> =====
>On Friday, January 14, 2005, at 02:04 , kcasada wrote:
>
>> Somebody please correct me if I goof on this, but as I recall,
>> palatalized /n/
>> in medieval Spanish was represented by "nn" which is still used today in
>> some
>> formats where you can't use the modern {enye}, AKA the n with the squiggly
>> line above it!
>
>This is correct - and "squiggly line", more commonly called a tilde, was
>once merely a superscript _n_ - hence its use in Portuguese above
>nasalized vowels.
>
>And |ll| is written in Spanish for the _palatal_ lateral [L]. The
>spellings |tt|, |dd|, |ll| and |nn| or |ñ| are used in Basque to denote
>palatal plosives, lateral and nasal sounds - tho I believe |dd| is more
>commonly spelled |j|.
>
>This use of doubling of letters denoting dental/alveolar sounds in order
>to represent palatal sounds is AFAIK found only in Spanish & Basque, but
>as James' list of 'consonants in question' are dental/alveolars the same
>convention could be used.
>
>> ===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
>> <CONLANG@...> =====
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just getting back into conlanging after a bit of a break. I am reworking
>> emindahken's orthography so it uses no digraphs. I have a series of
>> palatalized consonants, and was thinking of using letter-plus-cedilla
>> to represent them. Is this done in any natlang or standard
>> transliteration
>> scheme? If not, what is the common way to represent palatalization with
>> one symbol? (Besides using the IPA symbol).
>>
>> The consonants in question
>> t
>> d
>> s
>> z
>> l
>> n
>
>tt, dd, ss, zz, ll, nn
>==========================================================
>
>On Friday, January 14, 2005, at 01:51 , James W wrote:
>
>>>>> Steven Williams<feurieaux@...> 01/13/05 4:01 PM >>>
>[snip]
>>> In cases where I _need_ to disambiguate in Gi-nàin, I
>>> use dotless /i/ as a palatalization marker and dotted
>>> /i/ as the full vowel marker.
>>
>> I had been using /j/ as a marker, and wanted to get away from
>> digraphs all together. Thus my question... :)
>
>In which case you'll not like |tt|, |dd| etc.
>
>> OTOH, I like the dotless /i/ idea, since unlike /j/ it does not
>> appear in any other context. I'll consider this...
>
>Not really keen on dotless i. But if you have not ruled out digraphs, then
>I guess |tt|, |dd| etc could be considered. An idea closer to Sreven's
>perhaps is to use |y| this way as the Hungarians do: ty /c/, ny /J/, ly /j/
>  <-- /L/. But maybe have _dy_ rather than their _gy_ for [J\]. So you
>could have: ty, dy, sy, zy, ly, ny.
>
>> ==========================================
>>
>>>>> Isaac Penzev<isaacp@...> 01/13/05 4:26 PM >>>
>[snip]
>>> Hmm. A tough question to answer in two words. The problem is that
>>> although
>>> there are languages with palatalized consonants that use Latin script,
>>> but
>>> they do it in different ways,
>
>They do indeed - there just is not a 'common' way of doing this.
>
>>> and I don't know a natlang that would have all
>>> those 6 consonants at once.
>> Well, the language is supposed to be spoken by humans native to another
>> planet. (Lots of conculture to work out still.....) So I won't be too
>> concerned
>> if there is no ANADEWism for this. :)
>
>I'm sure there is an ANADEW   :)
>
>>> Let us see. Cedilla is used in Latvian for this purpose, but it has only
>>> l :
>>> ļ, n : ņ, k : ķ and g : ģ pairs (and I suspect they are not
palatalized
>>> but
>>> mere palatal).
>>
>> Aha! I think my consonants in question are actually 'palatal' and not
>> 'palatalized'. I'm slightly confused on the difference, although it makes
>> hazy sense.
>
>A very large number of consonants can be palatalized, including the labial
>ones. I have assumed from what you have said that you are talking about
>actual palatal consonants.
>
>> Originally, the consonants were actually 'palatalized', I
>> think, and after my revision yesterday, they have become 'palatal.'
>> OK. I like the cedilla idea.
>
>Not the original use the true cedilla. In any case, is it really a cedilla
>that is used in Latvian. I seem to remember some discussion here not so
>long ago as to what sign it was that the Romanians put under |t| and the
>Turks under |s| - whether it was a subscript comma or a cedilla.  The
>effect is much the same. I think would allow either and I'd put them under
>|t| and |d| and not under |k| or |g| in Latvian manner.
>
>[snip]
>>> Czech has three palatalized consonants, they are marked with a haczek,
>>> that
>>> is written as an apostrophe next to small t and d, as this n : ň, t : Ť/
>>> ť, d
>>> : Ď/ď. Haczek is also used there to denote alveolar sibilants, e.g. s
[s]
>>>  :
>>> Å¡ [S].
>>
>> The potential problem with the haczek/apostrophe solution would be
>> confusion with the apostrophe-as-glottal-stop that I already use.
>
>Also the haczek would not sit well over all the letters you would want to
>use.
>
>>
>>> Feel free to use anything. From my personal taste, I would prefer plain
>>> good
>>> old apostrophes after the character.
>>
>> The aforementioned apostrophe problem... :)
>>
>>> But I may be biased by phonetic
>>> transcriptions of Russian and 12:25pm here now.
>>>
>>> -- Yitzik
>>
>> I don't understand the time reference (perhaps you meant 12:25 AM?)
>
>The standard way of transcribing Russian in Roman script is to use the
>apostrophe to show palatalized consonant  :)
>
>Ray
>=======================================================
>http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
>ray.brown@freeuk.com
>=======================================================
>"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
>can change into anything"
>          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

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