Minza stress and vowel length
From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, October 10, 2007, 2:37 |
After some consideration of the alternatives, I've decided to use the
acute accent to mark stress on non-initial syllables in Minza, and
length on initial syllables. The main ambiguity with this is in cases
where the second syllable of a three-syllable word is stressed and open
(in which case the vowel can be either long or short), but there are few
enough of these that they can be learned as special cases. I've made a
list of all the letters with acute accents that I could find in common
Windows fonts such as Times New Roman on my XP system.
á ấ ắ ǻ ǽ ć é ế í ĺ ń ó ố ớ ǿ ŕ ś ú ǘ ứ ẃ ý ź
It's interesting that a-with-ring can have an acute accent on top of it;
I considered the possibility of using å for a back vowel /A/, but I
didn't like the stacked accents, and /A/ is a common enough sound that I
prefer the simple letter "a" for it. The same argument goes for ă (with
breve) as a schwa sound. I could potentially use "c" for a vowel, as
it's unused (and not that much stranger than using "v" as a vowel). Or
"u w y" as in Welsh, for /1 u @/.
And I still haven't ruled out a more naturalistic spelling system; I
still like one of the older Minza spelling conventions that used
digraphs like "ch" /x/ and "ng" /N/, and even had "g" as an alternative
spelling for /x/. But for the lexicon and web page updates, the phonemic
spelling with one character per phoneme will do for now.