Re: Schwa vowel, which letter?

On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, B.Philip.Jonsson wrote:

> At 11:47 -0700 on 6.10.1998, charles wrote:
>
>
> > I think I need to add the schwa vowel to the standard 5
> > in my projected conlang. Which letter (grapheme?) would be
> > best to use for it? I've considered X, Y (Lojban),
> > or using W for /u/ and U for schwa, or "-", and worse ...
>
> If you still haven't decided, here are two other schemes that I've used in
> one of my langs:
Oh, I've decided lots of times, and probably will again.

>          /i/  /e/  /E/  /@/
> SCHEME 1  y    i         e
> SCHEME 2  i    y         e
> SCHEME 3  y    i    e    v
> SCHEME 4  i    y    e    v
>
> They are chronologically ordered, i.e. scheme 4 was the final one.  The
> lang had a bilabial/labiodental approximant phoneme written "w", and as can
> be seen it acquired an open mid /E/ in the course of its development, which
> called for a reassignment of "e" and a new schwa letter.  The mapping of
> "y" to /e/ was based on the usual Romanization of Ukrainian: the Ukrainian
> vowels corresponding to Russian (Romanized!) "y" /@/ and "e" /E/ are
> phonetically [e] and [E], or close enough.
It does seem that "y" is the best choice for 6th vowel;
if a 7th is needed then "w" seems too wide and ugly,
and maybe "v" becomes the next best option. At one time
I wanted to keep many of the 13 or so English vowels,
but now 5 to 7 feel more comfortable somehow.
Similarly, I have moved away from consonant clusters.