Re: Latin-alphabet transcription systems

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004 12:12:59 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
wrote:

>Slavicists use 'ezh' (the IPA [Z] character for /dz/,
>the same with haczek for /dZ/ and with acute for /dz\/.
>Of course the acute is used similarly on _c s z_, and I
>must say I always found these usages neat.  Unfortunately
>Unicode doesn't seem to have precomposed glyphs for any of
>these, probably because they are only used by scholars and
>not in any national orthography.
I'm definitely planning on using c' s' z' with acute for these sounds (as
in Polish, etc). For /dz/, I've been using z with dot above in my Tirelat
romanization, which is just plain /z/ in Maltese, but of course I have "z"
for /z/, and I can't think of a better use for z-dot. But since I've got
z-hac^ek for /Z/, I could use ezh for /dz/ and ezh-hac^ek for /dZ/, which
would leave z-dot available for something else (perhaps /d`z`/).

>As you know I like diacritics because they allow for uniform
>modifications far better than prostheticized letters do.
>BTW if you like to place accents on _ö, ä_ etc. you might
>consider using the combining dieresis below instead of
>dieresis above.  Lepsius' "Standard Alphabet" did just that.
>It need not clash with dieresis below for brethy voice,
>since breathy vowels can be symbolized with a following
>breathy-h symbol (whichever you use).
I'm having some success with diacritics, but I've noticed the diacritics
below the letter are easily confused with each other. Specifically,
Zharranh has /n`/ (which might reasonably be written n-dot-below) and /J/
(n-comma-below). The digraphs "rn" and "nh", on the other hand, are easily
distinguishable, and the sequence /rn/ doesn't occur in Zharranh, so
ambiguity isn't a problem (as it would be in Lindiga).

The "real" Zharranh spelling has also been through a reform a while back,
when I added diacritics to the Tenai alphabet instead of the confusing
digraphs I'd been using; the palatals have a "ring above" diacritic, and
the retroflexes have something that looks like a backwards cedilla. The
Zharranh page has long been overdue for revision, since I was still using
the old SIL fonts that Netscape doesn't like (because they're symbol fonts)
when I originally wrote the page. So it looks like Zharranh could be an
appropriate test case for the new romanization system.

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