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Re: Latin-alphabet transcription systems

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Monday, February 2, 2004, 4:50
On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:08:35 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
wrote:

>At 07:31 29.1.2004, Herman Miller wrote: > >>On the other hand, the Latin alphabet doesn't have nearly enough vowels, >>and the IPA symbols for retroflex sounds are convenient. So it's possible >>that a mixed system of mostly Latin letters with some IPA might be a good >>compromise. > >And cool to boot! Why not? It is essentially the same as some >African languages do. > >/BP 8^)
By the way, I found a link to an online copy of "Practical Orthography of African Languages", which might be of interest to anyone else trying to devise a Latin-alphabet writing system for their langs. http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/poal30.htm I found the link on Nick Nicholas's "Unicode Resources" page, http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/index.html The "Practical Orthography of African Languages" page (or "PAOL" for short) gives a number of reasons for avoiding diacritics in general, but some of these (diacritic marks being likely to wear out or break off) aren't relevant to electronic documents (which didn't exist in 1930 when PAOL was published). A couple of the criticisms of diacritics are still relevant, but I don't see how I can avoid them entirely. The IPA retroflex letters look better than letters with dots under them, but they don't have capitals, and there aren't any letters for affricates. I'll probably end up using s and z with hac^ek for /S/ /Z/; they exist in most fonts (unlike the IPA equivalents), and they have precedents in numerous languages. For the same reason, c + hac^ek is appropriate for /tS/. But what to do about /dZ/? PAOL recommends writing it as d + ezh. In other languages, it's often written as "j" (like English), but then /j/ has to be written as "y", and some other symbol needs to be used for /y/. There's j with hac^ek, but that doesn't have a capital form. Then there's the Esperanto g with circumflex, but that's ugly. I'd like to use "j" for palatal sounds, like PAOL uses "y" in combinations like "ny", "ly", "ky" and so on. Zharranh has words like /CiCta/ "wind", which would be "hyihyta" or "hjihjta". Neither of these alternatives looks very good, but the one with "hj" is marginally better. But if "j" marks palatal sounds, I can't use it for /dZ/: "nj" for instance would be ambiguous between /J/ and /ndZ/. So there's another place where diacritics might be better than digraphs: using a "comma below" diacritic for palatals would let me avoid most of the problems of using "y" for /j/, and the only thing I'll need to figure out is what character to use for /y/. Precomposed "h" or "x" with comma below doesn't exist, but diacritics below characters aren't a problem with capitals, so either of those would be possible for /C/. For /y/ I'm thinking of using "v with hook", which could be seen as the Greek letter upsilon (the sound represented by "v with hook" in IPA can be written as "vh" if it's needed). That also gets around the problem of using the Polish hook for nasalization if I ever have a language that needs /y~/. -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

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Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>