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Re: Orthography of palatalized consonants

From:Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>
Date:Thursday, January 13, 2005, 22:32
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