Re: OT: Orthographic challenges

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> taliesin the storyteller skrev:
>
>  >> "Γr" against "Rʀ" and "Hʜ" is tempting... я as a
>  >> rhotic is just plain wrong. Sorry for that.
>  >
>  > Ah, but it sure *looks* raspy, and stands out.
>
> Nope. If it stands for any single sound it is [&]. The use
> of я for {r} is a 'feature' -- or f**kture as one 'net
> friend calls such thing -- of ignoramuses' faux Cyrillics,
> when something should look like Cyrillic but be 'readable'
> to those who know no Cyrillics, as when they wrote the
> Bulgarian Krum's name Кгцм {kgcm} (IIRC) in the Harry Potter
> movie. Painful!
I think that is going way too far. It is nothing special to use Roman
letters mirrored (e.g. Toys R Us, NIN=Nine Inch Nails). An extension of
this to a graphemic distinction is again nothing special: consider the
IPA's rotated rhotics. Я is probably the easiest way to do this in
Unicode even if it is not strictly speaking correct. In this regard it
is no worse than the way Wikipedia uses izhista for the unencoded
right-hook v in the IPA.

As for spelling Krum as "Кгцм", it will have been done to include the
English-speaking audience better into the movie. Artistic licence and so
forth. Considering that almost no-one (who knows English) knows the
Cyrillic alphabet, I think it a reasonable move on their part. So I
think it is absolutely a "feature" and nothing to be ashamed of.

(Now, you might have a case if you were criticising a conlanger like
Hergé who e.g. spelt /S/ as сз in his Cyrillic script for Syldavian ---
even tho it's obviously not meant to be understood. But I don't think
even this obvious ignorance warrants that contempt or that language. The
best cure for ignorance is education, not swearing.)

--
Tristan.

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