Re: OT: Orthographic challenges

T. wrote:
<<
The ortography of Taruven is more of a transliteration than a
proper orthography and sometimes the system breaks down. For
instance:
 >>

First thought: Why bother with a roman orthography since
Taruven *has* an orthography?  Why not simply use a transliteration
system--i.e., it just sounds the way it's spelled?  Save all the
inventive stuff for the orthography--the one discussed here:

http://taliesin.nvg.org/taruven/symbols.html

T.:
<<
I've been using ¨ (umlaut) to mark roots that are written with a
symbol instead of with letters, for instance in the
negation-marker {ë-}.
 >>

Bear with me if I'm not understanding.  Are these words that
have no phonological stem?  They simply have an orthographic
form to which affixes are attached?

T.:
<<
A word in taruven cannot end in a voiced stop. Voiced stops are
therefore either aspirated (written with an {h}) or adds a
protective e (now written as {e}). Unfortunately this means that
words that actually end with an aspirated voiced stop, or voiced
stop+e, can be mistaken for words with "protected" final voiced
stops. This is unfortunate because in a compound or when adding
suffixes, the "protection" is stripped away:
 >>

Of course, if you don't represent this in the roman transliteration
system, it's not a problem.

Assuming we're talking about the orthography, though, this
*isn't* a problem at all--far from unfortunate.  You have two
different noun genders, as it were, that look identical.  That's
very cool!  Now, is this the case...?

Class I:
(Requires aspiration or protective /e/)
dagh "cave" (sg.)
dagen "cave" (plu.)
ige "short"
iga "shorter"

That's the first class.  There could *also* be a class like this:

dagh "ukulele" (sg.)
daghen "ukulele" (plu.)
ige "short"
igea "shorter"

In other words, the difference is between a stem that is phonologically
/dag/ and a stem that is phonologically /dagh/.  Here the only
way that you can tell the difference between the two stems is when
an affix is added--which is pretty cool (e.g., if you saw the word
"box" in isolation in English, you wouldn't know if it was a noun
or a verb.  If you saw "boxed" or "box-sized", though, you would).

Anyway, this reminds me of the orthography for Sidaan:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/sidaan/orthography.html

In the orthography, the glyph for /h/ is used to show:

*the sound [h]
*length on a final vowel
*geminates

Here are three words showing each version (the orthography
[represented by roman characters for ASCII] is in quotes; the
romanizaiton [minus diacritics] is next without quotes; and the
phonological form is in slashes):

"hEntEsta" hendesta /hEndEsta/ "short"
"qaffah" qafah /qafa:/ "breathe"
"xahsa" xassa /xassa/ "fire"

So all the romanization does (the middle column) is give the
reader the best approximation of how to pronounce it, based on
a regular system.  I used final /h/ for length, because if you add
a suffix, the [h] returns and the length disappears:

"qaffaho" qafaho /qafaho/ "breathed"

I save the interesting stuff for the orthography (e.g., the fact
that a doubled fricative produces a singleton intervocalically
[an intervocalic singleton fricative voices], and the fact that
an orthographic /h/ produces a geminate when it produces
another consonant (also that voiced obstruents don't appear
in the orthography at all).

So with the romanization that people are actually going to look
at and use, I recommend being as transparent as possible.  It's
just a tool, after all; the orthography (your symbols) are the
artistic bit.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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