Re: Orthography of palatalized consonants

>>>> Steven Williams<feurieaux@...> 01/13/05 4:01 PM >>>
> --- "James W." <emindahken@...> schrieb:
>> 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
>
>Orthographically, Polish represents palatalized
>consonants with /C + i/; to make up an example, since
>I don't know any Polish, the word /piak/ would be
>pronounced [p_jak]. I do the same thing in Gi-nàin,
>and many transliteration schemes of Chinese do it as
>well. If you want to disambiguate, like if your
>language had a series of diphthongs with the first
>element being [i] (for example, [i@], [iu], etc), then
>you could concievably use /j/ or /y/, though that'd
>look a bit ugly in my opinion.
>
>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... :)

OTOH, I like the dotless /i/ idea, since unlike /j/ it does not
appear in any other context. I'll consider this...

==========================================

>>>> Isaac Penzev<isaacp@...> 01/13/05 4:26 PM >>>
>James W. scripsit:
>
[snip]
>> 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.
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. :)

>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. Originally, the consonants were actually 'palatalized', I
think, and after my revision yesterday, they have become 'palatal.'
OK. I like the cedilla idea.

>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].
The potential problem with the haczek/apostrophe solution would be
confusion with the apostrophe-as-glottal-stop that I already 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?)

Thanks, Steven and Yitzik!

—---------
James W.

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