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Help Weird Up My Orthography

From:Shreyas Sampat <ssampat@...>
Date:Monday, August 22, 2005, 10:31
It's been a long time since I conlanged seriously, but with the
revival of the fiction anthology I'm using Seinundjé for (y'know,
Tolkien-style, to add setting colour), I've been wanting to, like,
make it better. And now, I'm getting humg up on my Latin orthography,
because, well, it's not very exciting. Sein' doesn't have an
especially exotic phonology, which makes it pretty easy to come up
with an uncomplicated spelling for it...the problem lies in walking
the line between something too easy and something that even I can't
read.

The phoneme inventory is this:
Consonant:
p    b    t    d                    t`    d`    k    g
f    v    T    D    s    z    S    Z    s`    z`    h    G
     m    n_0    n                    n`        N
                             r        l`
     w                        y

The affricates ts, tS, t`s`, and their voiced counterparts also
exist, but are ugly to include in the chart.

Vowel:
i            u
     e    o
     a

Vowels lengthen contrastively, marked with acute accents.

So, like, the prettified orthographic consonant chart I have so far
looks like this:
p    b    t    d                    tj    dj    k    g
f    v    th    dh    s    z    ch    jh    sj    zj    h    gh
                 ts    tz    c    j    cj    tzj
                 tss    ttz    tch    tjh    tcj    ttzj*
     m    nh    n                    nj        ng
                             r        l
     w                        y

The <j> diacritic of retroflexes only appears at the end of a
consonant cluster; the correct spelling for /Dun`d`ke/, for instance,
is <dhundkje>. It indicates that the alveolar consonants preceding it
are retroflexed. In fancy typesetting environments, I use the comma-
below diacritic on each retroflex consonant individually.

*These are geminated affricates. The remainder of geminates double
<h> or the first letter of the spelling, if no <h> is available. I
made these guys slightly irregular for aesthetic reasons.

Finally, some affixes cause metathesis, like the nominaliser -n;
these are marked with an apostrophe between the parts that exchanged
position (kúdh-n > kún'dh).

This generates some very pretty texts[1], but it just isn't that
interesting to me... how can I, um, weird it up?

[1]
Nédhhiul, methne kirikkíssne lésesen: O mists, that you would clear!
Hujhul-Kún'dh-mí-Harástechhó: Tangled Root of Heroism

--
Shreyas
njyar.blogspot.com

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Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>