Re: Help Weird Up My Orthography

Hi!

Shreyas Sampat <ssampat@...> writes:
> 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. ...
Hi Shreyas, welcome back! :-)

> 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.
:-) My current project S11 also uses Latin orthography -- it might
even be kept as it is since I especially like the assignment of
graphemes to vowels:

    <a e i o u ä ë ï ö ü>
    /A e i o u & 7 M 2 y/

Consonants are much uglier and require Unicode.  I'm also currently
not very productive wrt. to neographies.

> 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
s, S, s` are funny.  :-)
And m, n_0, n, n`, N.

<j> for retroflex seems weird to me, but maybe I just need to
think French [Z] instead of German [j], then its clearer.

>...
> 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).
Metathesis is cool! :-)

The sandhi of S11 (which are not finished yet) use a lot of
metathesis, too, to enforce the languages sonority constraints.

>...
> This generates some very pretty texts[1], but it just isn't that
> interesting to me... how can I, um, weird it up?
Hmm.  How about introducing complex, irregular sandhi?  And dont
insert helping apostrophes or dashes. :-)

> [1]
> Nédhhiul, methne kirikkíssne lésesen: O mists, that you would clear!
> Hujhul-Kún'dh-mí-Harástechhó: Tangled Root of Heroism
Looks nice and I think it sounds good, if I pronounce it correctly
(although I'm bad at gemination together with vowel length, so
/kirik:i:s:ne/ is a bit difficult).  How does stress work?

Looks nice to me.  I'm curious about the grammar.

**Henrik

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