Re: Another update of gjâ-zym-byn

On 8/30/05, John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...> wrote:
> Jim Henry wrote:
>
> >I've updated the gjâ-zym-byn site again....
> >I'm still willing to consider changes to the vowel orthography at this
> stage,if John Quijada or someone else will come up with more concrete
> >suggestions for how it could be improved.
> As for specific suggestions...since you're now willing to use diacritics,
> why not the following:
>
> Using ü or y for /y/ instead of the less intuitive î;
>
> using ö for /9/ instead of the less intuitive ô;
This is easy enough; I will probably do this
when I next do a major site update.

> using u with a hacek or breve for /U/ instead of the less intuitive y.
This is much harder.  I can search and replace î and
ô character entities with the u-umlaut and o-umlaut,
but either replacing |y| in gzb text with some u-diacritic would
involve a tedious manual process, or else I would
do that replacement automatically and then manually
fix all the places where |y| in English text was mutated.
I'm not sure which would be worse, and I don't
think I want to do either -- though I recognize in hindsight
it was probably a bad choice, in some respects.

However, |y| representing /U/ is one of the most common vowels
(far more common than /y/ represented by |ix| or i-circumflex î)
and so it made sense to give it a single ASCII letter.

> (All in all, I'm curious why you don't seem to want to use
> umlauts/diaeresis, but are willing to use the far less common hacek over
> your vowels.)
Originally it was a matter of consistency -- use haceks
and circumflexes throughout the entire alphabet.
That was how my handwritten orthography for gzb
worked at first.

When I started looking for Unicode equivalents of those
letters, I couldn't find them all, but I picked the closest
equivalents I could find.

> On the consonantal front:
>
> Using the more standardized ç for the palatal fricative /C/ instead of s
> with a hacek ;
> using g with a haceck or circumflex for the voiced velar fricative instead
> of barred-h (which an IPA-knowledgeable reader might misinterpret as the
> voiceless pharyngal fricative / X\ /;
Quite possibly, yes.

> Use digraphs pf and bv for your labio-dental affricates instead of the
> bizarre non-Roman letters you have.
Hm... maybe.

> Just suggestions, of course!
Thanks.  I'll consider those, and probably implement at
least your first two vowel change suggestions,
whenever I next do a major site update.  I'm not sure
when that will be, though; at least two weeks
hence and probably a good bit longer.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm
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