Re: Orthography of palatalized consonants

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]
>>  :
>> š [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
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
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