Re: Fun with orthography

On Saturday, October 13, 2001, at 12:13 , taliesin the storyteller wrote:

> The orthography, or actually the _transliteration_ of my conlang târuven
> into a more or less latin-looking alphabet, has changed quite a few
> times, and no doubt it'll change even more.
>
:-)  I've done similar, though far more minor, changes:

[tS] used to be <ch> and is now <cz>
[S] used to be <sj> and is now <sz>
That was mainly for consistency's sake, and because I liked the
pseudo-East-European "feel" of the z's.

> Now, I show length with an acute on the vowels, and doubling the
> consonants:
>
> târuven saì yárra
>
Quite pretty.  :-)

> The latest change is that aspiration and breathiness is shown by an <h>
> and not an apostrophe:
>
> 'reged' > hregedh (evolution, gradual change)
>
> 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>?

> I'd say the look has improved, wouldn't you agree? (Not to mention that
> searching for words has become easier; search-engines tend to croak on
> non-alphabetic signs.)
>
<G>  I like it a lot.

Though for a four-tone language that never went anywhere, I contemplated
using punctuation to indicate tone:

meep! would be [mip] with high tone
meep? would be [mip] with low-high rising tone
meep. would be [mip] with low tone
meep\ would be [mip] with high-low falling tone

(I! know. it. ab.so.lute!ly. lacks. o.ri.gi.na!li\ty. does.n't? it!  But
it was fun to contemplate.  If I ever do get around to a tonal conlang I
may use some such scheme.)

> Now to the point: as Mark Rosenfelder shows in the Language Construction
> Kit (at http://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html#alphabets):
>
>     "In my fantasy world, for instance, Verdurian D^arcaln and
>     Barakhinei Dhârkalen are not pronounced that much differently, but
>     the differing orthographies give each a different feeling. Surely
>     you'd rather visit civilized D^arcaln than dark and brooding
>     Dhârkalen? (Tricked you. It's the same place.)"
>
> the orthography chosen affects the mood and feel of a language. So, one
> wants to experiment with that look and feel.
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> The best way for _me_ to get the feel of a language's visual properties
> is by looking at lots and lots of text in it (trying not to read
> it). However, testing changes in such a text by manually changing, say,
> all h'es after unvoiced consonants but not the ones anywhere else can
> be quite a chore. (A further problem is that there aren't lots and lots
> of things written in târuven yet, for several reasons.) 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.)  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).  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.  =^)

> I use the before mentioned M. Rosenfelder's [*] sounds-program (at
> http://www.zompist.com/sounds.htm) to change _English_ text into his
> mock-phonemic orthography (see http://www.zompist.com/spell.html), and
> then doctor that a little, and then I use sounds again, to produce an
> "English as written in târuven"-version, and hey presto! lots and lots
> of text! Now it becomes possible to use sounds again, to adjust the
> orthography further. Here's an examplei, using the paragraph above:
>
Nice!  I'll have to remember that as a possibility next time I'm screwing
around with romanized orthography.

> [*] Anyone play "Traveller" here? :)
I have the GURPS version of the sourcebook but unfortunately have never
found anyone else who plays it.  Which is a pity, since I would've loved
to be involved in a Traveller campaign.  (My fiance did pick up the
original sourcebook but it's in Boston with him.  Grep.)  Why?

Yoon Ha Lee
requiescat@cityofveils.com

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.--Paul Erdos

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