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Re: Latin-alphabet transcription systems

From:Felix Ahlner <felix_ahlner@...>
Date:Monday, February 2, 2004, 12:47
>>And cool to boot! Why not? It is essentially the same as some >>African languages do. >> >I've noticed that a lot of the Latin Extended-B characters are described as >"African". I wish Daniels and Bright had more examples of these symbols. It >sounds like the basic approach in African scripts is similar to what I'm >thinking of: digraphs for sounds like /x/ and /G/, the IPA symbols for a >few common vowels like /E/, /O/, /@/, and so on. They mention that Côte >d'Ivoire uses ä, ï, ö for central vowels, which is the same thing that I >was planning on using them for.
Then, the PDF files (or, more correctly, versions of the same file) found at the bottom of this page could be useful: http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/afrolingua.html "Typesetting African Languages" And maybe my own old school essay on how diacritical marks are used in some european languages. But if you want to read my brilliant (hrmm :-) summary at the end, you have to know some Swedish. But the list of diacritics is nearly polyglott :D http://home.swipnet.se/ahlner/Projektarbete.pdf Notes for the list,beginning on page 14: Längd = length (quality), Uttal = pronunciation, Betoning = stress, Betydelse = meaning. I'm thinking of doing a similar work on how modern languages are using and adapting the roman alphabet (and maybe similar things with the cyrillic, arab, chinese etc) to their own sounds etc. Ie. that slavic languages tend to have the same diacrits, and that the letter C stands for [ts] etc etc. Ortography is interesting ;)

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Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>