Re: Orthography of palatalized consonants

James W. scripsit:

> 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
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, and I don't know a natlang that would have all
those 6 consonants at once.

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).

Polish has many palatalized consonants, but it uses a silent "i" after them
if they stand before a vowel, so it uses digraphs in this case. Before
consonants only few of them are met, and those are s : ś, z : ź, dz : dź, c
: ć and n : ń (again they are rather palato-alveolar than palatalized).

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].

Feel free to use anything. From my personal taste, I would prefer plain good
old apostrophes after the character. But I may be biased by phonetic
transcriptions of Russian and 12:25pm here now.

-- Yitzik