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Given Up on Roman Orthography

From:Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
Date:Monday, January 11, 1999, 22:54
Alright! That's it! I give up! I surrender! The Roman alphabet
sucks! IPA rulz!

Ever since I started constructing Boreanesian, I have tried to make
a Romanized orthography work knowing that if I were to put a grammar
sketch of Boreanesian up on the web someday I would have to limit
the orthography to ASCII characters. Some of you conlang-L
old-timers may have noticed that I have been struggling over this
for ages. But today I have officially given up. It just does not
work. The Roman alphabet is just too inadequate. It can't be because
there are more sounds in Boreanesian than the average language - on
the contrary: Boreanesian has a relatively small inventory of
sounds. It is because there are sounds and many phonological
features that can't be represented by the Roman alphabet to my
satisfaction.

So instead of a Romanized orthography, I'm transcribing Boreanesian
using the IPA (or quasi-IPA) for my grammar sketch. Besides, since
Boreanesian has its own script, it could seem frivolous to have a
Romanized orthography as well. I have seen grammars of languages use
the IPA (or quasi-IPA) - and quite succesfully too, IMHO. I'm hoping
to do the same. Unfortunately, the web can't do the same. For those
of you interested in having a look at a grammar sketch of
Boreanesian, you'll have to make do with a hard-copy. (I should have
something ready this coming spring and will send everyone interested
a copy).

I'm not very keen on representing Boreanesian on the web via a IPA
to ASCII scheme. IMO, there are no succesful ASCII-IPA schemes. But
perhaps I can still have a web-page with IPA fonts? Can a web-page
still be view with IPA-fonts if viewers have downloaded the SIL-IPA
fonts? I'm not very computer literate.

Oh BTW, I'll still post things about the Boreanesian language. But
I'll have to represent the language through ASCII-IPA.

Regards,
-Kristian- 8-)