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Re: Orthographies with lotsa diacritics (was: Ogoneking the Consonants)

From:Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Date:Saturday, May 27, 2000, 20:27
Kristian Jensen wrote:

>Are there any natlang orthographies that use the ogonek >diacritic with consonants?
Yes, but only in Cyrillic. Some minor Altaic (or Uralic or Caucasian?) languages use ka-ogonek for /q/, but the major Central Asian languages such as Kazakh and Turkmen just put a straight tick on the right leg of K (in the same way the tick turns /S/ into /StS/ in Russian or /St/ in Bulgarian). There doesn't seem to be any universal standarization of usages of Cyrillic in ethnic languages of Russia, except for incidental things like O-bar for the mid front round vowel (a letter that was dropped when it was _fita_, a redundant /f/ corresponding to Greek theta, but came back in Ural-Altaic languages to be the aforementioned vowel). However, Kazakh, Tatar-Bashkir, Turkmen and Kyrgyz use mostly the same conventions for extended characters: a Latin h (capital is a big lowercase h) for /h/, a K-extended leg for /q/, a H-extended leg for /N/, barred O, and Latin Y (lowercase is v with a straight descender) for /y/. Uzbek uses X-extended leg for /h/, but unlike the others, they dropped letters only used in Russian (like _shcha_ and bI /y/) and changed the values of others (_zhe_ is now /dZ), B _ve_ is /w/, and _fe_ phi is bilabial instead of labiodental). The vowel O is a low back rounded vowel like English and Farsi "aa"; the vowel /o/ is marked with Cyrillic /u/ (the y not the Y) with breve accent, which has the value /w/ in Belarussian. Did I just go way off topic? DaW. ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com