Re: Valdyan alphabet (was: Re: Spanish alphabet)

Quoth Irina Rempt-Drijfhout:
> That's a long-standing controversy in Dutch, whether "ij" is one
> letter (some people even use a Dutch typewriter or computer keyboard
> that has "ij" next to "p"; the glyph is horrible, it's Alt-0152 in
> the Windows-1252 character set) or two letters. I hold that it's one
> letter written with two symbols, like "ll" and "ch" in Welsh. My
> maiden name is "Drijfhout" and people always had to look in both
> places when looking it up in an address list.
Aren't there some orthographies that treat it as 'y'?  I'm sure I've
seen some printed Dutch that included e.g. the number "vyf" (but it was
sort of old, so there maybe was some reform along the way).

> I used to alphabetize transcribed Valdyan the more or less European
> way:
>
>  a b c ch d dh e f g gh h i j l lh m n o p r rh s sh t th u v y z zh
>
> but now I've worked out the Valdyan order of letters, it is:
>
>  a y i e o u p b f v m t d th dh n l lh c g ch gh h r rh s sh z zh j
>
> that is, first vowels, then consonants approximately from front to
> back, and the sibilants come at the tail. Note that 'j' is pronounced
> /j/ (as in "you") in most dialects, but /dZ/ in the far west (as in
> "Joe").
Hmm.. interesting.  I also ran my alphabet in order from front to back
in the mouth, but I interspersed the vowels, since they too ran from
front to back.  But then, I was going for a rhythm, too, and doing it
this way made a nice pattern.  After all, when it's a bard that's
codifying the written language and alphabet, she's damn well gonna set
it to music, and it'll sound good too!  :)

--
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
        How many seconds are there in a year?  If I tell you there  are
3.155  x  10^7, you won't even try to remember it.  On the other hand,
who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a
nanocentury.                                    -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs