Seinundjei Script (is actually about allophony now)
| From: | Shreyas Sampat <ssampat@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, March 1, 2006, 8:01 |
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John Vertical wrote:
> I read your previous explanation on how the harmony works, but I'm
> still not sure if I follow. Is harmony marked on consonants or vowels?
> Or both? In other words - taking a word like "tithina": would all the
> consonant and vowel markers be alveolar, or would it be possible to
> show etymology by using a, say, palatal fricative sign + the dental
> form of i?
>
> John Vertical
Hm.
Okay, I think this is a way to put it:
The consonant glyphs show -citation forms.- If he felt the need to be
extremely pedantic and clear, then a speaker might suppress harmony and
pronounce those consonants. This is basically analogous to English
speakers saying [w_0Vt] for 'what'.
The vowel matras show what harmony quality is going on in the consonant
they are attached to.
For historical reasons there shouldn't be a word with the citation form
|t'ith'in'a| (where 'V = palatal vowel marker) (hm, except perhaps in
forms I have not discovered yet, where the second part of a compound or
idiom breaks off and retains its harmony quality) or |cithinha| (this
would be a misspelling anyway; dental/alveolar status does not spread),
but in a running text you will see things like the following:
tithin /tiTin/
bech t'ith'in /beS tSiTiJ/
nénj t,ith,in /ne:n` t`iTin`/ (this is starting to make for a nice way
of narrowly transcribing sein' script)
where the |tXthXn| (for whatever reason |tithina| didn't sound like good
Sein' to me:) sequence represents the same word, varying allophonically.
Did that make sense, or am I staying up too late?
--
Yetyem Lédh once stole the sword of Rakaui. It did not go well for him.
It was hardly a century, or what passed for one in the time before the
gods had won their Names, before the sword in its indignation sliced off
his hand.
Shreyas Sampat
http://njyar.blogspot.com
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