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Re: Fun with orthography

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...>
Date:Sunday, October 14, 2001, 0:38
* Yoon Ha Lee said on 2001-10-13 23:11:44 +0200
> On Saturday, October 13, 2001, at 12:13 , taliesin the storyteller wrote: > > Furthermore, getting rid of the comma (which shows palatalization) > > would be nice, to say the least. > > Hmm. Could you reassign palatalization to the apostrophe, or do you > want to just not have apostrophes? <pondering> Is there another > alphabet-letter going unused that you could assign, like <j>?
Taken, for /Z/. The only regular 26-letter alphabet character that hasn't been used for something is {w}. I've though of using {µ} though, but the comma is even more of a modifying diacritic than the apostrophe ever was.
> Though for a four-tone language that never went anywhere, I > contemplated using punctuation to indicate tone:
Tone... my long vowels currently insist on being pronounced with a higher (level) tone than the rest. Will this thing ever stop mutating? :)
> > [..] Therefore, I've been looking for a mechanized solution, and I > > think I have it: > > :-p Because I use lots of place- and people-names from Czevraqis in > a novel-in-progress, I do have a lot of opportunity to see lots of > partial-transliterated-text, though I agree changing everything is a > pain. (Thank God for search-and-replace-all.)
Regexps and sed is the one, true way.
> And I still have a few "artifacts" of older transliterations running > around: Rekke [*eke] still has the doubled <k> for "echoed vowels" > (i.e. when you have the same vowel before and after a consonant).
Ahh, like finding a webpage that haven't been converted to the new morphology, how fun ;)
> Previously Rekke was accompanied by Esse [ese] and Darra [da*a] and so > on, but Reke just looks too awful. So the Avren dialect may end up > getting geminate consonants--because of a spelling artifact. =^)
Why not just let it be a spelling artifact, non-phonemic orthograpies are quite interesting (unless its English :) ) t.

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BP Jonsson <bpj@...>