Re: Help Weird Up My Orthography

> Shreyas Sampat <ssampat@...> writes:
> > 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.
If you're developing it diachronically from an ancestor
language, maybe you could conserve historical spelling
in some of the most common words.

Or maybe you could make do with a smaller subset
of the Latin alphabet and make more extensive use
of digraphs and context-dependent pronunciation
of digraphs and single letters, to simulate the speakers
of the language having adapted an alphabet
from a language with a much smaller phoneme
inventory.  This might depend on the language's
phonotactic constraints, e.g., if there's a context
that /s`/ can occur in and /s/ cannot, then in that
context you could just write |s| for /s`/ while
continuing to write it |sj| in contexts where
/s/ could also occur.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
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